Comments by Adérito Silva

Adérito Silva 11-Aug-21 23:18pm View

As far as I know, there is no easy way to do that. I can think of ways it would be possible, but I didn't put too much thought on it.

I believe it would be possible by hooking certain windows functions, including those responsible for interchanging Windows Messages.

Another way would be to display the contents of the 3rd party application window on your application (as if your application was a screen recorder) and send Windows Messages to the 3rd party application to simulate user input coming from your application. However, that would be complex and would require a lot of work.

Depending on how the specific 3rd party application handles its window size, you could send some Windows Messages to change its window type, after the application sets it itself. Then, it might be possible to send another Windows Message to set your own size and position to be within the bounds of your own application.

As a last resource, hacking the application executable might also work, but that would require some reverse engineering skill and may be violation of copyright or something.

Either way, doing that is hacky, is hard and may or may not work. As Gerry Schmitz also suggested, using a virtual machine to run the application or even a sandbox might be a valid solution.

Adérito Silva 2-Aug-21 16:02pm View

And this is my App class, where FontSize is declared:

    public partial class App : Application
    {

        public double FontSize => 30.0;

    }

Adérito Silva 2-Aug-21 16:01pm View

This is the code I'm using, which is working fine and the text doesn't get blurry:

        <Button x:Name="BtnSettings" Width="90" Height="30" Margin="200,14,0,0" Padding="6,3"
                HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top"
                UseLayoutRounding="True" SnapsToDevicePixels="True"       
                FontSize="10">
            <Button.Content >
                <Viewbox x:Name="myViewbox"
                         SnapsToDevicePixels="True" 
                         Stretch="Uniform" StretchDirection="Both">
                    <TextBlock x:Name="myTextbox" Margin="0,-2,0,0"
                               FontFamily="Segoe UI">
                        <TextBlock.FontSize>
                            <MultiBinding>
                                <MultiBinding.Converter>
                                    <local:AverageConverter/>
                                </MultiBinding.Converter>
                                <Binding Source="{x:Static Application.Current}" Path="FontSize" Mode="OneWay"/>
                                <Binding Path="FontSize" RelativeSource="{RelativeSource Mode=FindAncestor, AncestorType={x:Type Button}}"/>
                            </MultiBinding>
                        </TextBlock.FontSize>
                        FontSize =
                        <Run Text="{Binding FontSize, Mode=OneWay, 
                             RelativeSource={RelativeSource Mode=FindAncestor, AncestorType={x:Type TextBlock}}}"
                             FontWeight="Bold"/>;
                    </TextBlock>
                </Viewbox>
            </Button.Content>
        </Button>

Adérito Silva 2-Aug-21 15:45pm View

Your bindings are working fine on my end. For example, I set the Application.Current.FontSize to 100 and the button FontSize to 10. My TextBlock FontSize is 55, which is the average of 10+100. The text gets blurry, because of the text options you are using. Set TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Ideal" or remove text options all together. That works for me.

If you are still getting the same error on the converter, check your bindings again. For example, you are using camel case on the binding to 'Application.Current.fontSize'. Is it intended, or may it be a simple misspell? Because, that happens to me if I misspell it, as well.

Adérito Silva 1-Aug-21 17:23pm View

Dude, I mean no offense, but that code is really messed up. As others have mentioned, you are not passing safe SQL commands, which would need to be correctly escaped before being sent to the database (parameterized). Also, you need a lot of error handling, or your application will stop working many times on the users. You also need data validation, which is needed to validate any user input, specially when that data is to be stored. Adding to that, the code is hard to read and to maintain; it has lack of separation of concerns, like DB stuff being done directly on event handlers and things like that.

It would be better to have a class dedicated only to database operations, with proper error handling that safely closes connections if something wrong happens, and handling UI operations in their own methods, away from business logic. As for input validation, you need to make sure that there is nothing a user can input or do in your application that can make it work incorrectly or even make it stop working at all.

Adérito Silva 1-Aug-21 16:49pm View

Probably, there must be something wrong with your binding. The converter expects to receive an IConvertible, which includes any number type, but it is getting a NamedObject. That means your bindings are getting the wrong value. It would be better to first try simple bindings in your XAML code, so you can see if they are working. If yes, try each of your bindings elsewhere, like on the Text of a TextBlock to see what values the bindings are getting or so. The converter is working fine on my end.

Adérito Silva 1-Aug-21 16:36pm View

Usually, using dictionaries is best for languages. However, the whole language system of an application should be a bit more powerful than a simple dictionary. It is normal for a language to be represented by a culture in .NET, instead of a name, and a culture to be represented by a numeric code or a standard string pattern representation. A language has more than simple literal sentences, it has specific rules for how numbers, dates and time are represented, as well as singular and plural rules. It would be better to create your own Language class and a specialized collection for creating collections of that class, which could use a Dictionary or a HashSet internally.

Also, a dictionary of string keys needs attention to culture and casing for the comparison of keys. You would want a dictionary that behaves the same way independently of the current thread culture or UI culture. For example, in a simple dictionary use like in your example, I would specify a StringComparer in its constructor to avoid using the default comparer.

Adérito Silva 1-Aug-21 16:11pm View

My answer has the code for the converter. You can use the converter I wrote to bind to whatever you want. In the binding example, I used a DoubleCollection just for convenience, but you can bind to Application.Current as well.

Just replace my code where it has:
<binding source="{StaticResource fontSizes}" path="[0]">
<binding source="{StaticResource fontSizes}" path="[1]">
<binding source="{StaticResource fontSizes}" path="[2]">

With your own bindings, like:
<binding source="{x:Static Application.Current}" path="fontSize" mode="OneWay">
<binding ...any="" other="" binding="" you="" want...="">

Adérito Silva 1-Aug-21 16:07pm View

Deleted

My answer has the code for the converter. You can use the converter I wrote to bind to whatever you want. In the binding example, I used a DoubleCollection just for convenience, but you can bind to Application.Current as well.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 22:52pm View

Your code is working exactly as you telling it to do. You're basically telling it to display the value of 'lang' plus the value 'selectedLang' plus "[0]". It would output exactly "language0[0]".

To get the value from the language array, you would need to access a specific array value, like language0[2], which would output "Previous".

I'm not sure if I understood what you meant.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 17:32pm View

I don't know why this is happening, but it seems like something related with the MenuItem style/template. Are you using a custom MenuItem style or template? Are you using a custom CheckBox style or template?

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 17:16pm View

What is the type of fontSize property on your Application.Current? It should be double.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 17:12pm View

For theming purposes, you would set up your own theme object (for instance, a class derived from ResourceDictionary). Then, users would download a theme template from your website, or something, and they would edit it and compile it as a DLL, using Visual Studio. Your application would then load that assembly (the theme DLL) and look for your own theme type on the DLL, instantiate it and add it to the application's merged resource dictionaries.

Users would need your theme template, with all XAML files and resources, so they could have a starting point and change only what they need. They would also need to use Visual Studio (it is free anyway), which can be overwhelming for non-developer users but has the advantage of having the XAML designer and everything else that's needed.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 17:03pm View

Do you mean, you want users to edit XAML files for application theming purposes? Your do you want them to be able to compile applications for themselves?

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 16:43pm View

The ListView should work nicely, but if you require the use of an ItemsControl, you may consider the HierarchicalDataTemplate. By representing data hierarchically, you can then use StackPanels acting as rows and have each of its items sized independently (acting as columns). For this, you would need a way of knowing what items go where (to a new row or to the next column?), but a table is a two-level hierarchy anyway, so it should be feasible. You won't need a grid.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 16:20pm View

To style items differently, you can use CellTemplate property on each column. You would set it with a DataTemplate and use DataTriggers and/or DataType to specify what items should use as template and, for example, set its font weight. In this case, if your items have a property like 'IsGroup', you would use a DataTrigger to set the font weight. If groups and items are of different types, you would use the DataType property of DataTemplate to restrict the template to that specific type.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 16:12pm View

I'm not sure how to address the question. For example, what is the exact error and where it occurs?

FontWeight uses FontWeight type. If you return a string in your converter, it won't work, because you would need to convert the string to FontWeight (using FontWeightConverter, for instance). Is that the error you get?

Also, DataGrid has several styles that can be set, including for groups (GroupStyle property). Are these the groups you mean?

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 15:56pm View

Just like @snooze said, this would be done using the query string on the URL, just like most browsers do with default search engines. If, for some reason, the web site is not using query strings to specify the user profile, it must be doing it in some other way. For example, if the site uses HTTP post data instead of simple URL queries, you would need to use an HTTP client class, like HttpWebRequest, to mimic the website's search form post data.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 15:12pm View

MediaPlayer is the control for playing video, which uses DirectShow and is limited to the video codecs you have installed on your system.

However, playing video from a byte array is not the usual way and is not performance friendly. You would use a Stream, for anything video related, as having a video file completely loaded into memory is a bad idea. Imagine you playing a 2 hours 4K AVI movie of about 1 Terabyte... how could it be loaded into a byte array in RAM? In this case, you would use a FileStream to load the video from a file and the player would only load small chunks of the video into a static buffer in memory, which would likely consume just a few Megabytes in RAM. Also, because how big is the buffer and how big are the loaded chunks depends on the video format, resolution, pixel format, etc., so the codec is the one responsible for handling that.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 14:55pm View

In your converter, you would simply do the following:

// This requires System.Linq namespace.
return values.Cast<double>().Average();

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 14:50pm View

In your converter, you are converting from string to int, but you should expect double, because you are binding your values to FontSize property, and also return double because FontSize property where you are using the converter expects a double.

The correct way would be to check if the value is of type double, throwing an exception if it isn't, or returning your calculated values if it is. Parsing strings and returning strings is not necessary there.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 14:42pm View

The ViewBox uses render transforms internally, which transforms content after it has passed layout calculations. That's probably why text becomes blurry. In your case, using a layout transform might give you better results.

Adérito Silva 31-Jul-21 14:13pm View

Basically, OriginalGriff's answer explains the reason it happens. .NET is a managed platform, meaning memory allocation and cleaning is automatic and developers don't need to manage it manually. What you are witnessing is the allocation of memory not being cleaned up by .NET immediately, which is normal and expected. If memory consumption keeps growing, .NET will eventually clean it — which is called "garbage collection" — and the "wasted" memory will be free again. Cleaning memory impacts performance while doing so, that's why .NET only cleans it when needed.

If you want to test that, try to "consume" a lot of memory by creating new object instances and leave them out of scope (so they are no longer needed). Repeat that thousands of times and see how memory consumption grows. Eventually, you will see a big drop in used memory, which is when the Garbage Collector cleans it. Visual Studio's performance tools display information about the garbage collection in real-time.

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