Archives

by dkt

Twelve Ways to Improve WPF Performance

There is no shortage of information out there on how to speed up the performance of WPF applications, but too often the focus is on the weird stuff instead of the simpler issues. I’m not going to talk about things like writing to WritableBitmaps to optimize drawing—it’s a topic covered to death elsewhere. Instead, this is meant to be a slightly more practical guide to squeezing performance out of WPF in ways that are probably more likely affecting you.

Some general notes

ItemsControl and its subclasses ListBox and ListView exacerbate performance problems because these controls are highly dynamic (resolution happens “late”), involve WPF collections (which are slow), and have difficult and unpredictable lifetimes for their child controls. Scrollbar performance is often a big problem in larger WPF apps because of problems that seem trivial for small collections, but suddenly blow up with larger data sets.

Also, it can be difficult in WPF to know exactly when the system is finished with an object. For views, you get the FrameworkElement.Unloaded event, but it gets raised at times you might not expect (such as system theme changes) and not at times when you might (application shutdown). On viewmodels associated with views, you’ll never get a WPF notification that a viewmodel is about to go unused by a view. Blend-style behaviors also have their own set of lifetime problems.

Then there are some problems (like this and this) where WPF leaks for you too.

Finally, there are things (this, this, this, this, this, and this) that simply perform worse than you likely expect.

Finally, there are old UI/WinForms problems (this, this, and this) that never really went away—they’re just less likely to happen.

  1. Fix Binding Errors
  2. Hard-code widths and heights where possible
  3. Avoid CollectionView.Grouping
  4. Optimize bindings to collections that change
  5. Avoid DynamicResources
  6. Avoid ResourceDictionary
  7. Simplify your visual tree
  8. Be wary of System.Windows.Interactivity.Behavior<T>.OnDetaching
  9. Do not use DependencyPropertyDescriptor for any reason…ever
  10. Be careful of viewmodel events
  11. Batch up Dispatcher.BeginInvoke
  12. In general, beware of memory leaks


I. Fix Binding Errors and Exceptions

Every time a binding error occurs, your app hangs for just a split second as it writes out errors to the trace log. If you have a lot of binding errors, then those split seconds start to add up. Make sure to go through your bindings, especially those on ItemsControls (ListViews, custom grids, etc.) and verify that there are no binding errors.

Open up your app in the debugger and play around, especially where there is slowness. Make sure all bindings resolve without errors.

RelativeSource in DataTemplates may also result in bindings that break initially, but then later resolve properly. Be wary of them, and try to use inherited attached properties instead of relying on RelativeSource in DataTemplates.

Viewmodel bindings

  1. Make sure that your views and view models are in sync. Use ReSharper 6 to help you find broken bindings.
  2. If you’re binding to a collection of objects with mixed types, add different DataTemplates so that none of them refer to non-existent properties.
  3. Make sure that your converters aren’t throwing exceptions. These have a cost too.

View-based RelativeSource bindings

  1. When using ListBoxes and ListViews, it’s a common problem to have this problem. Avoid RelativeSource.FindAncestor expressions at all cost here, because the deferred behavior of templates cause the object and its bindings to be created (and resolved) before the ListBoxItem/ListViewItem is added to the visual tree.
  2. An alternative is to define an attached dependency property on the ListBoxItem/ListViewItem, and use property inheritance to give your child items the necessary property values. This essentially pushes property values down the visual tree instead of searching up.


II. Hard-code sizes where possible

This may not always be a practical or desirable solution, but layout passes perform faster when widths and heights do not have to be recalculated. They may also help stop a layout pass from rippling through an entire visual tree.

And always set specific widths on columns in a grid (be it a ListView + GridView or any third-party control), because these tend to be very expensive, especially with larger data sets.


III. Avoid CollectionView.Grouping

Grouping in WPF doesn’t perform terribly well, especially with ListViews and GridViews. Create a collection with mixed viewmodel types–your original collection, and one that represents the “group”. Use DataTemplates to change the appearance of your “group” objects.

For example, if you have a PersonViewModel class with a property that you want to group by (let’s say Region), it is faster to create a mixed collection of MyGroupViewModel and PersonViewModel objects, ordered correctly by group, with different DataTemplates, than it is to bind to a grouped collection. Unfortunately, it’s a lot more work.


IV. Optimize bindings to collections that change

Repeatedly calling ObservableCollection<T>.Add when the collection is data-bound can be a prohibitively expensive operation, especially with thousands of rows. Unfortunately, the framework provides no easy, satisfactory fix.

Fix 1: Use ObservableCollection as-is, but break bindings

  1. Break the binding to the collection.
  2. Update the collection while not data-bound.
  3. Re-bind.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37

// some methods removed for brevity
public partial class MyViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    private ObservableCollection<T> _people;
 
    public IList People
    {
        get { return _people; }
        private set
        {
            if (_people != value)
            {
                _people = value;
                OnPropertyChanged("People");
            }
        }
    }
 
    void BatchAddPeople(IEnumerable<Person> newPeople)
    {
        var currentPeople = _people;
 
        // stop WPF from listening to the changes that we're about
        // to perform
        this.People = null;
 
        // change
        foreach (var person in newPeople)
        {
            currentPeople.Add(person);
        }
 
        // cause WPF to rebind--but only once instead of once for
        // each person
        this.People = currentPeople;
    }
}

Fix 2: Use the older .NET 2.0-era collections instead

  1. Use System.ComponentModel.BindingList<T> (from the old days) instead; it has an API for suppressing change notifications.

Fix 3: Reimplement ObservableCollection.

  1. Create your own collection that implements INotifyCollectionChanged.
    • Raise INotifyCollectionChanged as sparingly as you can.
    • Raise the event with a NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Reset event for anything more trivial than a simple single-item add, remove, change, or move. Do not take advantage of the NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs constructors that take collections of items; you will find support for it spotty at best.
  2. Implement System.Collections.IList on your collection. WPF does not use the generic System.Collections.Generic.IList<T> interface; it is completely ignored. If you don’t implement the interface, WPF will perform almost all operations (including accessing rows by number!) strictly by the IEnumerable implementation, and it won’t be very optimal or fast about it.
  3. (Probably) implement System.Collections.Generic.IList<T> as well. WPF doesn’t use it, but you probably will (through LINQ, Rx, etc.)


V. Avoid DynamicResources

Even in .NET 4.0, DynamicResource access is still slower than StaticResource access. And worse, once you start nesting DynamicResources (for example, a ListView whose Style contains a ControlTemplate that references objects through DynamicResources), you’re likely to run into situations where you leak controls.


VI. Avoid ResourceDictionary

This advice is practically impossible to follow, but do your best. There is a huge cost in constructing ResourceDictionaries, and depending on where you place them, you are probably constructing many more objects than you realize.

A common, sensible, and logical pattern is to keep usages of elements as close to where you use them as possible. Many people place resources in UserControl.Resources, or break up their themes into multiple ResourceDictionaries for clarity and separation. Although this is arguably good programming practice, it also tends to be insanely slow. If your windows/controls or your ListBoxItem/ListViewItems in a ListBox/ListView are coming up more slowly than you would like, it’s probably a combination of too much ResourceDictionary construction and/or DynamicResources. (Yes, even in .NET 4.0.) Collapse ResourceDictionaries as much as you can, and try to ensure that the contents of these dictionaries is only loaded once. The easiest and surest way is to include it in the resources of your System.Windows.Application object, almost always difficult or infeasible for composite applications.

I have also frequently taken to creating static classes that contain nothing but highly reusable resources (think static framework classes like the Brushes class) because it’s easier to guarantee that objects are only being created once, and hopefully at app startup instead of triggered by the user interacting with the application and forcing a lazy load at an undesirable time. Not necessary the healthiest design, but the performance is quite a bit better.

Using implicit ControlTemplate/DataTemplate styles will also help keep your code and XAML organized without the need for either StaticResource or DynamicResource.


VII. Simplify your visual tree

Shallow visual trees are better than deeper visual trees. Again, ItemsControls will usually exacerbate performance problems with deep visual trees because if they’re not being virtualized, they’re being destroyed and recreated; if they are being virtualized, changing DataContext in a deeper tree takes more time than changing DataContext in a shallower one.


VIII. Be wary of System.Windows.Interactivity.Behavior<T>.OnDetaching

Sadly, System.Windows.Interactivity.Behavior<T>.OnDetaching will generally not get called. Put a breakpoint and see for yourself.

OnAttached signals the addition of a behavior to a control (generally at instantiation of your XAML); OnDetaching signals the removal of a behavior from a control (generally never, as behaviors don’t get removed from controls). Don’t put sensitive disposing behavior in OnDetaching. The Unloaded event is a better place for that, but be aware that it will get raised every time the control is removed from the visual tree.


IX. Do not use DependencyPropertyDescriptor for any reason…ever

DependencyPropertyDescriptor.AddValueChanged classes cause the WPF framework to take a strong reference to the source of the event that isn’t removed until you call DependencyPropertyDescriptor.RemoveValueChanged. This class is frequently used in conjunction with Behaviors, so if you have RemoveValueChanged in OnDetaching, you’re likely leaking memory. Because of WPF’s references to your objects, it is not just enough to drop references to your view and view model.

A better alternative is to rely on data binding where you can; create a DependencyProperty for the sole purpose of listening to changes on your target property, and use the change notifications in DependencyProperty in order to listen to changes on the target property. It keeps the observed object (generally, your view model) from accidentally holding a strong reference to your view.


X. Be careful of view model events

If your views or behaviors rely on events being raised from a viewmodel (as innocuous as INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged or INotifyCollectionChanged.CollectionChanged), subscribe to them weakly. Viewmodels tend to have a longer lifetime than views (consider a virtualized ItemsControl), so it’s possible that your view model will inadvertently gather references to views. Use classes like PropertyChangedEventManager or CollectionChangedEventManager, or (painfully) use the WeakEventManager to create your own event manager for your custom events. It’s painful, but usually necessary in order to prevent view models from taking references to views.


XI. Batch up Dispatcher.BeginInvoke

If your application displays data from a network, you’re probably using background threads to accomplish the task (which is good). However, you’re probably not consciously counting your Dispatcher.BeginInvoke calls (which is not as good). The more you’re able to coalesce multiple Dispatcher.BeginInvokes into a single call, the more likely WPF will be able to help you out by making single subsequent layout and render passes, and the lower your overall CPU usage.

To be fair, WPF is much better at trying to help you here than VB6/WinForms—you won’t often see apps that dance and flicker incessantly any more—but there is still a non-zero cost to updating the screen, and if you have a particularly large application, this could be a problem for you.


XII. In general, beware of memory leaks

This is a bit of a generalization of the last few points, but memory leaks make apps behave worse over time. Fixing memory leaks goes a long way in fixing the performance of an application. And since most developers are constantly restarting WPF apps as they work on them, they often go undetected until the software is delivered.

—DKT

by dkt

Collections, CollectionViews, and a WPF Binding Memory Leak

A colleague of mine recently came across some code that should work, but doesn’t:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

private ListBox SomeListBox;
private ObservableCollection<string> SomeStrings = new ObservableCollection<string>();
 
public void SomeMethod()
{
    SomeListBox.ItemsSource = null;
    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(o => AddToStrings());
}
 
private void AddToStrings()
{
    // this line will actually crash the app!
    SomeStrings.Add("blah");
 
    Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(() => SomeListBox.ItemsSource = SomeStrings);
}

So basically, detaching an ObservableCollection<T> from a view, adding an element on a background thread, and then reattaching it back on the UI thread again. Generally, view-bound objects can only be modified from the UI thread, but shouldn’t detaching the collection first should make that a non-issue?

When you actually run the code, you get one of those obnoxious “InvalidOperationException: The calling thread cannot access this object because a different thread owns it” messages, and then your app will probably die. These usually happen because you’re trying to modify a control or an object bound to a control, neither of which applies here. It also happens when you’re trying to do anything with a subclass of DispatcherObject or a DependencyObject on the wrong thread, but that doesn’t apply here either, right? ObservableCollection<T> does not have any inherent thread affinity, and it is definitely safe to pass between threads so long as access to it is synchronized.

So we took the control out of the picture by writing SomeListBox.ItemsSource = null, and ObservableCollection<T> can be modified from any thread. What’s the problem? Those are the only two objects in the picture, right?

ICollectionView

(If you already know what ICollectionView is, feel free to skip to the end of the story.)

Actually, when any IEnumerable is bound to an ItemsControl, an implementation of ICollectionView is created to wrap the collection, and it provides a means for sorting, grouping, and filtering without affecting the original collection. So when you bind a ListBox, or ListView, or the WPF Toolkit DataGrid, or some other third-party ItemsControl to a grid, a CollectionView is created specifically to maintain intermediate state on behalf of the control without having to touch the original collection.

Consider some List<string>:

Index Value
0 Cheese
1 Apple
2 Tomato
3 Salad

We bind it to a DataGrid, and then we tell the DataGrid to sort itself. The list should look like this:

Index Value
0 Apple
1 Cheese
2 Salad
3 Tomato

Note how the objects now have different indices. It’s an important detail—WPF manages to accomplish sorting, grouping, and filtering all without modifying the original collection because of the use of a CollectionView (or one of its subclasses ListCollectionView, BindingListCollectionView, or the internal CollectionViewProxy class). It also pulls off some shiny tricks occasionally, batching changes where appropriate and postponing actual CollectionView reordering (which can obviously get expensive) until subsequent pumps of the current Dispatcher. And that’s why CollectionView inherits from DispatcherObject.

And of course, if our collection changes, the CollectionView listens for those notifications and responds appropriately, causing hilarious consequences when the change happens on a background thread.


The Fix

The implementation of CollectionView is somewhat broken when collections implement INotifyCollectionChanged:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

internal CollectionView(IEnumerable collection, int moveToFirst)
{
    /* some code snipped for brevity */
    INotifyCollectionChanged changed = collection as INotifyCollectionChanged;
    if (changed != null)
    {
        // this is the problem
        changed.CollectionChanged += this.OnCollectionChanged;
 
        /* some more code */
    }
 
    /* still more code */
}

Nowhere anywhere is this event handler unwired. So collections essentially retain strong references of their corresponding CollectionViews. The data binding system that is responsible for creating the CollectionView maintains a weak reference, but as long as the original collection is alive, the data binding system will be hooked into the CollectionView, and therefore the original collection as well.

The fix actually isn’t so bad:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Data;
 
public class BetterObservableCollection<T> :
    ObservableCollection<T>, ICollectionViewFactory
{
    public ICollectionView CreateView()
    {
        return new BetterListCollectionView(this);
    }
}
 
public class BetterListCollectionView :
    ListCollectionView, IWeakEventListener
{
    public BetterListCollectionView(IList list) : base(list)
    {
        INotifyCollectionChanged changed = list as INotifyCollectionChanged;
        if (changed != null)
        {
            // this fixes the problem
            changed.CollectionChanged -= this.OnCollectionChanged;
            CollectionChangedEventManager.AddListener(list, this);
        }
    }
}

As soon as the collection is detached from the view, the view’s reference to the CollectionView is broken, and the CollectionView is allowed to disappear because nothing (neither the original collection nor the binding system) is holding on to a strong reference any more.

What “The Fix” Breaks

The CollectionView is responsible for managing sorting, grouping, and filtering. If you disconnect the collection from the view, the CollectionView will get garbage-collected, and the sorting, grouping, and/or filtering you had on the control will be lost. That may or may not matter for your particular use case, but it’s definitely something to think about. If that is important, it may make more sense to bind to a System.ComponentModel.BindingList<T>, which tracks its own grouping, sorting, and filtering inside the list itself—the tradeoff is then you lose the ability to have multiple views on the same collection. —DKT

by dkt

Attached Behaviors are the New OLE (a.k.a. Long Live Components)

Pruning through the old Google Reader starred items list was supposed to only take me an hour or so Saturday morning. But sandwiched between some other diversions, it ended up taking me the whole weekend. One of the last things I read was
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review (that was an hour right there all by itself). Flipped through some of the old Mac OS X articles, particularly those right at the turn of the Classic Mac OS transition almost ten years ago. You remember Classic Mac OS, right? With Cyberdog and OpenDoc? Windows users will remember the ideas more as OLE and its foundation COM, and a generation of applications where the screen jumped to and fro whenever you clicked somewhere you weren’t supposed to as menubars popped up and disappeared. And of course, there was J2EE .

Maybe these technologies suffered from being too ambitious or too undefined in scope, but for whatever reason, they’ve been consigned to the dustbin of history. But the dream of having arbitrary components that could just be snapped together like building blocks never seems to die, and maybe we’re finally reaching the point in technology’s history where that could be a possibility. OLE, OpenDoc, and J2EE all assumed those building blocks were gigantic—plug six or seven them together and boom, you’ve got an app—whereas realistically, they’re probably much closer to LEGO®-sized. You’ll need a lot of them before you get something that makes sense—and consequently, you need a little bit of computer know-how.

Fellow Lab49er Charlie Robbins blogged a few weeks ago about a few
sample Silverlight projects that added physics-based behaviors to a canvas with a few items in it. It’s downright silly what you can do with behaviors now, and I wonder if we’re not too far off from seeing a scaled-down version of the component dream realized. It always seemed like overkill to have an IntegerTextBox, or a DateTextBox. But an IntegerBehavior/DateBehavior that can be applied to a TextBox, or a grid cell? Or a behavior that could be applied to a Label to make it an editable TextBox upon a double-click? Or better yet, two behaviors, one to make a label editable on a double-click, and another to restrict to date entry? Much more awesome…

If you haven’t read up on attached behaviors yet, you should. I would argue that a proper MVVM design necessitates attached behaviors—they’re everything that doesn’t belong in the viewmodel layer, but since your views should be stupid and codeless, your “enforce integerness” behavior has to end up somewhere. With viewmodels and attached behaviors, you might never need to write another line of code-behind ever again. —DKT

by dkt

More 2D/3D Tricks: ItemsControl3D

Building on some of the cute tricks of using a Viewport3D as a two-dimensional surface, we can actually devise a fully-bindable System.Windows.Controls.ItemsControl that renders to a Viewport3D instead of a Panel. It turns out to all be quite remarkably simple:

  1. Define a class, ItemsControl3D, that will be our magic Viewport3D-holding ItemsControl.
  2. Build a ControlTemplate that contains a Viewport3D with a named ModelVisual3D whose children will be modified as the ItemsControl sees fit.
  3. Override GetContainerForItemOverride() to provide instances of ItemsControl3DItem as the “container” for the individual items in the ItemsControl:
    1. Make the “container” item a zero-size, completely non-visible FrameworkElement.
    2. Create an ItemsControl3DItem.Geometry property; this Geometry3D object will be used to populate the ModelVisual3D in our Viewport3D.
  4. I additionally chose to implement container recycling (in some early drafts of ItemsControl3D, it cut processor usage down 25%).

First, the static constructor:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

static ItemsControl3D()
{
    DefaultStyleKeyProperty.OverrideMetadata(
        typeof(ItemsControl3D),
        new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(typeof(ItemsControl3D)));
 
    ItemsPanelProperty.OverrideMetadata(
        typeof(ItemsControl3D),
        new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(
            new ItemsPanelTemplate(
                new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(ItemsControl3D.ItemsPanel)))));
}

The first line should be familiar to those in the audience who have authored custom controls before; it merely indicates that somewhere, WPF should expect to find:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

<<b>Style x:Key="{x:Type ThreeDee:ItemsControl3D}"</b>
        TargetType="{x:Type ThreeDee:ItemsControl3D}">
  <Setter Property="Template">
    <Setter.Value>
      <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type ThreeDee:ItemsControl3D}">
        <Border>
          <Grid>
            <Viewport3D Name="PART_Viewport">
              <Viewport3D.Camera>
                <OrthographicCamera
                         Position="0,0,1" LookDirection="0,0,-1" UpDirection="0,1,0"
                         Width="{Binding Path=ActualWidth, ElementName=PART_Viewport}"/>
              </Viewport3D.Camera>
 
              <ModelVisual3D>
                <ModelVisual3D.Content>
                  <AmbientLight Color="White">
                </ModelVisual3D.Content>
              </ModelVisual3D>
 
              <ModelVisual3D x:Name="PART_SceneRoot"/>
            </Viewport3D>
 
            <ItemsPresenter/>
          </Grid>
        </Border>
      </ControlTemplate>
    </Setter.Value>
  </Setter>
</Style>

The line after that (the overriding of the ItemsPanel metadata) indicates that for all ItemsControl3D, the default Panel presenting children for the panel should be ItemsControl3D.ItemsPanel. This is an inner class that we’ve defined that is specially crafted to hold the child elements of the ItemsControl.

In the style, we’ve given one of the ModelVisual3D children a name (PART_SceneRoot); that’s because in OnApplyTemplate(), we’re going to look for it and use that as the place to hold the 3D objects that we generate.

We override a trio of methods in order to perform basic container housekeeping. GetContainerForItemOverride() either creates a new container or reuses an existing one; ClearContainerForItemOverride(…) adds an unused ItemsControl3DItem back to the pool; IsItemsItsOwnContainerOverride(…) is useful to override if you wanted to manually create and add ItemsControl3DItem objects to the ItemsControl3D.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

private readonly Stack<ItemsControl3DItem> _unusedContainers =
        new Stack<ItemsControl3DItem>();
 
protected override DependencyObject GetContainerForItemOverride()
{
    if (_unusedContainers.Count == 0)
    {
        return new ItemsControl3DItem();
    }
    else
    {
        return _unusedContainers.Pop();
    }
}
 
protected override void ClearContainerForItemOverride(
    DependencyObject element, object item)
{
    _unusedContainers.Push((ItemsControl3DItem)element);
}
 
protected override bool IsItemItsOwnContainerOverride(object item)
{
    return (item is ItemsControl3DItem);
}

Lastly, the actual “panel” that the ItemsControl thinks is doing the work:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

private new sealed class ItemsPanel : Panel
{
    protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size availableSize)
    {
        var ic3d = (ItemsControl3D)GetItemsOwner(this);
        if (ic3d != null)
        {
            <b>ic3d.UpdateViewportChildren(InternalChildren);</b>
        }
 
        return Size.Empty;
    }
}

And that’s all the panel needs to do. The magic method call is actually the property accessor Panel.InternalChildren—internal code in Panel works together with ItemsControl in order to derive the appropriate children (this is ultimately what will cause GetContainerForItemOverride() and other methods to be called).

Lastly, the private method UpdateViewportChildren in ItemsControl3D:

private void UpdateViewportChildren(UIElementCollection children)
{
    if (_sceneRoot == null) return;
  
    _sceneRoot.Children.Clear();
    foreach (ItemsControl3DItem item in children)
    {
        var m = item.Model;
        if (m != null)
        {
            _sceneRoot.Children.Add(m);
        }
    }
}

And in case you were wondering, ItemsControl3DItem at a high level:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

public class ItemsControl3DItem : FrameworkElement
{
    public double X { get; set; }
    public double Y { get; set; }
    public Brush Background { get; set; }
    public Geometry3D Geometry { get; set; }
    public ModelVisual3D Model { get; }
}

The properties of ItemsControl3DItem (X, Y, Background, Geometry) are all used to determine the Model property.

You can use an ItemsControl3D in XAML as easily as any other subclass of ItemsControl:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

<ThreeDee:ItemsControl3D ItemsSource="{Binding ...}">
    <ItemsControl.ItemContainerStyle>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type ThreeDee:ItemsControl3DItem}">
            <Setter Property="X" Value="{Binding Year}"/>
            <Setter Property="Y" Value="{Binding Profit}"/>
            <Setter Property="Background" Value="Blue"/>
        </Style>
    </ItemsControl.ItemContainerStyle>
 
    <!-- you could also hardcode children in the control just like 
         ListBoxItems in a ListBox or ListViewItems in a ListView -->
    <!-- <font color="#555555"><ThreeDee:ItemsControl3DItem X="5" Y="6" Background="Blue"/>
         <ThreeDee:ItemsControl3DItem X="2" Y="3" Background="Red"/></font> -->
</ThreeDee:ItemsControl3D>

It should be noted that this exact technique can be used to generate full-blown three-dimensional visualizations with nothing more than basic ItemsControl-style bindings. Coupled with an abstract data model, you’ve got yourself a pretty canvas to paint with, and it’s pretty responsive to updates as well and doesn’t blow a hole through your CPU either. The sample app updates all of the values in a collection of 1,000 points, ten times a second, while using less than 10% of my two-year-old MacBook’s CPU.

The Sample Code: ItemsControl3D.zip

—DKT

Sept 24: Fixed the problems with the download. Of course, since the AssemblyInfo.cs file was missing, the [assembly:ThemeInfo(ResourceDictionaryLocation.SourceAssembly)] tag was missing too—that caused the default template that I defined for ItemsControl3D to not be found. This is fixed now.

by dkt

2D in a WPF 3D World

It’s a fairly common and standard trick to take advantage of the hardware acceleration afforded by modern graphic cards and render two-dimensional figures in 3D. Here is a simple and fast way to take the 3D out of a Viewport3D:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24

<Viewport3D>
  <Viewport3D.Camera>
    <OrthographicCamera Position="0,0,1" LookDirection="0,0,-1" UpDirection="0,1,0"
                        Width="{Binding ActualWidth}" Height="{Binding ActualHeight}"/>
  </Viewport3D.Camera>
 
  <ModelVisual3D>
    <ModelVisual3D.Children>
      <!-- render colors...relatively properly -->
      <ModelVisual3D>
        <ModelVisual3D.Content>
          <AmbientLight Color="White"/>
        </ModelVisual3D.Content>
      </ModelVisual3D>
 
      <ModelVisual3D x:Name="SceneRoot">
        <ModelVisual3D.Content>
          <!-- this is where stuff you want to render actually goes -->
        </ModelVisual3D.Content>
      </ModelVisual3D>
 
    </ModelVisual3D.Children>
  </ModelVisual3D>
</Viewport3D>

When the camera is set up this way, the center of the Viewport3D represents (0,0). The bottom-left is (−width / 2, −height / 2) and the top-right is (+width / 2, +height / 2).

Now what can you put in something like this? Same thing you’d normally put in a Viewport3D:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<Model3DGroup>
  <GeometryModel3D Geometry="...">
    <GeometryModel3D.Material>
      <DiffuseMaterial Brush="..."/>
    </GeometryModel3D.Material>
  </GeometryModel3D>
</Model3DGroup>

The Brush property can be any old System.Windows.Media.Brush. And as for that Geometry? Well, there are squares:

1
2
3
4

<MeshGeometry3D x:Key="Square">
                Positions="-1,-1,0  1,-1,0  1,1,0  -1,1,0"
                Normals="0,0,1  0,0,1  0,0,1  0,0,1"
                TriangleIndices="0 1 2 0 2 3"/>

isosceles triangles:

1
2
3
4

<MeshGeometry3D x:Key="IsoscelesTriangle">
                Positions="-1,-1,0  1,-1,0  0,1,0"
                Normals="0,0,1  0,0,1  0,0,1"
                TriangleIndices="0 1 2"/>

Coming up with these little nuggets of numbers is the topic of another post. But for now, some sample code:

ThreeDee.png

Featuring basic hit-detection and a bit of interactivity (you can drag a square to increase/decrease the space between boxes, and change the angle of rotation). It’s pure WPF (no unsafe code or interop), it’s 2D, and it’s fast.

ThreeDee.zip

—DKT

Sorry the code formatting is off…the iPhone WordPress client totally destroyed it. I’ll fix it soonish.

by dkt

Building Custom Abstract Data Models in .NET

One of the easiest things to do in .NET is take either a list of vanilla C# objects or the contents of a System.Data.DataTable and show it in a grid through some kind of data binding. It was possible in the WinForms days with the System.Windows.Forms.DataGridView or a vendor-supplied grid (Syncfusion, Infragistics, etc.). It is still very much possible in WPF with the WPF Toolkit grid and any number of (and ChartFX gets special kudos for being able to “figure out” which columns/series are important and graph them by default).

But what if DataTables aren’t your thing, but vanilla C# objects aren’t “dynamic” enough for you? What if you need custom on-the-fly columns but don’t/can’t deal with the headaches of ADO.NET?

(You can skip straight to the Quick How-To if you’d like.)

Using Reflection to build a dynamic grid (don’t do this)

Let’s step back for a bit and consider the vanilla C# object case. Let’s say I wanted to render a list of these objects without using the automagic abilities that seem to be provided in every grid:

1
2
3
4
5

public class Order
{
    public string Symbol { get; }
    public long Quantity { get; }
}

A first stab at this might be to use the Reflection API:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29

public class OrderGrid : UserControl
{
    private void InitializeCustomProperties()
    {
        PropertyInfo[] properties = typeof(Order).GetProperties();
 
        // start the awful vendor-specific binding between the
        // reflection pieces and the grid
        foreach (PropertyInfo pi in properties)
        {
            myGrid.Columns.Add(pi.Name);
        }
    }
 
    private void _myGrid_CellValueRequired(object sender, MyGridCellEventArgs e)
    {
        string columnName = myGrid.Columns[e.ColumnIndex];
        PropertyInfo[] properties = typeof(Order).GetProperties();
        PropertyInfo pi = Array.Find(properties, p => p.Name == columnName);
        if (pi == null) return;
 
        var orders = (List<Order>)myGrid.ItemsSource;
        Order order = orders[e.RowIndex];
 
        // now read the actual property value
        e.Value = pi.GetValue(order);
        e.Handled = true;
    }
}

Seems simple and harmless enough, right? Now let’s layer on a slight air of dynamic data—something that seemingly necessitates a reflection-based solution:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50

public class Order
{
    public string Symbol { get; }
    public long Quantity { get; }
    public IList ExtendedAttributes { get; }
}
 
public class OrderGrid : UserControl
{
    private void InitializeCustomProperties()
    {
        PropertyInfo[] properties = typeof(Order).GetProperties();
 
        // start the awful vendor-specific binding between the
        // reflection pieces and the grid
        foreach (PropertyInfo pi in properties)
        {
            if (pi.Name != "ExtendedAttributes")
            {
                myGrid.Columns.Add(pi.Name);
            }
        }
    }
 
    private void _myGrid_CellValueRequired(object sender, MyGridCellEventArgs e)
    {
        PropertyInfo[] properties = typeof(Order).GetProperties();
 
        // only the first n - 1 columns represent reflection properties;
        // the last few columns come from ExtendedAttributes
        if (e.ColumnIndex < (properties.Length - 1))
        {
            string columnName = myGrid.Columns[e.ColumnIndex];
            PropertyInfo pi = Array.Find(properties, p => p.Name == columnName);
            if (pi == null) return;
 
            var orders = (List<Order>)myGrid.ItemsSource;
            Order order = orders[e.RowIndex];
 
            // now read the actual property value
            e.Value = pi.GetValue(order);
            e.Handled = true;
        }
        else
        {
            e.Value = (e.ColumnIndex - (properties.Length - 1));
            e.Handled = true;
        }
    }
}

It’s starting to get a little nastier now—as the Order class grows and its “ExtendedAttributes” properties get more complex, we end up doing more and more in the view to render this complex object properly—there is no metadata and no reflecting over “ExtendedAttributes”. We don’t know name or type information at the very least, and we certainly can’t decorate the items of the list with an Attribute like we could with a “real” C# property. There is no assurance that every Order’s ExtendedAttributes properties will behave the same way—we’re naïvely using index positioning to uniquely identify a property; what if my Order objects are coming from all over the place?

And how do DataTables always render so well? How does every grid under the sun know how to properly pull schema information from a DataTable using specific properties like DataTable.Columns and the appropriate accessors on every individual row? Does it really just boil down to this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

if (source.GetType() == typeof(DataTable))
{
    // DataTable specific code
}
else
{
    // a pile of ugly Reflection code 
}

And then what about the Windows Forms Designer? There are all sorts of properties that don’t show up, or show up with slightly different names, or slightly different characteristics than what one would expect through only reflection. Is there more switch/case hackery at work here?

The looks-like-a-DataTable-but-isn’t Approach (better)

It turns out that this problem is already solved, partially because of the original Windows Forms Designer, and partially because of DataTables. A rich API exists for allowing objects to describe themselves, and for lists of objects to publish information about their contents, even if the list is empty. System.Data.DataTable implements several interfaces, but the most important one for purposes of our discussion is
System.ComponentModel.IListSource, which contains an interesting method:

  • GetList: Returns an IList that can be bound to a data source from an object that does not implement an IList itself.

On DataTable, this returns an instance of DataView, which according to the documentation, “Represents a databindable, customized view of a DataTable for sorting, filtering, searching, editing, and navigation.” It turns out that a DataView is what is typically rendered by a grid. We can think of it as a a IList of DataRow objects (it’s actually a list of DataRowView, but that’s not terribly important here), which structurally, is much more similar to a list of boring C# objects.

There are a few other important interfaces that DataView implements other than IList (and ICollection and IEnumerable): ITypedList to provide schema information on the constituent rows (especially when the list is empty, because then we can’t ask the rows themselves) and IBindingList, which allows views to control sorting and filtering.

It turns out that if you implement a few of these key interfaces, you get all this magic for free, too.

The Quick How-To

  1. (Optional) Implement System.ComponentModel.IListSource on your “main” data class—you’d only need to do this if you didn’t want your main class to directly represent your “list” of data.
  2. Create a list class. It should provide implementation for a few interfaces:
    • System.ComponentModel.ITypedList.
      Your implementation of ITypedList.GetItemProperties(PropertyDescriptor[]) should return a PropertyDescriptorCollection that contains the “properties” of the rows of your data set. This interface is required when your list is empty so that a way of providing object metadata exists without resorting to querying the contents of the list.
    • System.Collections.IList.
      This is a hard requirement. Dealing with generic types generically is usually not straightforward and can sometimes require reflection; even to this day, a lot of code in WPF looks for (and makes use of) this interface.
    • System.Collections.Generics.IList<T>.
      I haven’t seen too much in the way of generic components requiring an implementation of this interface, but it’s a good idea to implement regardless—it’ll be easier to work with LINQ and other APIs that expect generic collections.
    • System.Collections.Specialized.INotifyCollectionChanged (optional).
      This is the same interface that classes like ObservableCollection<T> use to propagate their contents changes in WPF. (If you need Windows Forms support, you’ll have to instead implement…)
    • System.ComponentModel.IBindingList (optional).
      Implement this interface only if you need backwards compatibility with Windows Forms. It’s a bit of a hybrid interface, incorporating aspects of both ICollection and ICollectionView, but as a result of that, you’ll effectively limit clients to one view on your collection.
  3. (Optionally) Implement System.ComponentModel.ICustomTypeDescriptor on your “row” data class. I usually implement this by having each of my “rows” retain a reference to the “list”, and merely calling ITypedList.GetItemProperties(PropertyDescriptor[]) on the list. Implementing something once takes less time than implementing something twice.

    I like to implement ICustomTypeDescriptor on the row because it provides a context-insensitive way of retrieving properties of the row. If someone created a System.Collections.Generic.List<T> containing my “rows”, this list is still eligible for rendering in a grid without any additional work (except, of course, when the list is empty, because then there would be no way of providing schema information).

  4. Create a subclass of System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptor (read this if you don’t know what this class is for) for each property that you want your rows to have. You will want/need to implement a few important properties and methods:
    • public Type PropertyType { get; } (override required)
      The type of the property. If you want the type of values contained in the column to be completely wide open, then return typeof(object).
    • public TypeConverter Converter { get; } (override optionally)
      The converter that is used in conjunction with the property. For real properties, this would be defined through the usage of a [System.ComponentModel.TypeConverterAttribute] attribute on the property’s type or the property itself.
    • public Type ComponentType { get; } (override required)
      The type that defines the property. This is essentially your “row” class.
    • public object GetValue(object component); (override required)
      This is probably the most important method; this is the method that tells the system how to fetch a value from your row for the “property”.
    • public void SetValue(object component, object value); (override required)
      You can override this to set the value of this property on your row; otherwise, you can throw NotSupportedException if you want.
    • public bool IsReadOnly { get; } (override required)
      Return true or false, depending on whether or not the property should be publicly modifiable.
    • public bool CanResetValue(object component); (override required)
      When you’re using the Windows Forms Designer, this is the method that determines whether or not you can “reset” the value of the property to some default value. Other visualizers could make use of it too, but I haven’t seen too many that take advantage of it.
    • public void ResetValue(object component); (override required)
      This actually implements the resetting of a value as mentioned above. Either implement it or throw NotSupportedException.
    • public bool ShouldSerializeValue(object component); (override required)
      The Windows Forms Designer uses this method to determine whether or not a property’s value should be serialized. If a property was set to its default value, this method would return false because there would be no reason to actually persist the value of the property (since reapplying it wouldn’t result in a change).

The Quick Example

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223

/// <summary>
/// The class that serves as the "entry point" for your data model.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// It's not always necessary to create a class like this, but it can be
/// helpful from a design standpoint. Here, like the DataTable, I expose
/// a collection of "columns" that client APIs can use for their own
/// purposes.
/// </remarks>
public class MyDataTable : IListSource
{
    private readonly MyDataRowCollection _dataRows;
    private readonly PropertyDescriptorCollection _properties;
 
    public MyDataTable(...)
    {
        _dataRows = new MyDataRowCollection(rows, columns);
        _properties = columns;
    }
 
    public MyDataRowCollection Rows { get { return _dataRows; } }
 
    public PropertyDescriptorCollection Columns { get { return _properties; } }
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Returns the underlying collection of elements for this source.
    /// </summary>
    /// <remarks>
    /// It is somewhat rare to see this implemented any other way than through
    /// an explicit implementation because you will generally want to
    /// expose a specific collection type to expose more advanced behavior.
 
    /// (We do the same here through the <see cref="Rows"/> property.
    /// </remarks>
    System.Collections.IList IListSource.GetList()
    {
        return _dataRows;
    }
 
    bool IListSource.ContainsListCollection
    {
        get { return false; }
    }
}
 
/// <summary>
/// The class that directly represents a collection of rows.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// You can either implement IList<T>/IList manually, or inherit from another
/// collection implementation. However, your particular use case will probably
/// only need or want to expose a subset of the functionality of those interfaces,
/// so it may be beneficial to implement the interfaces directly and hide some
/// collection methods through explicit implementation.
/// </remarks>
public class MyDataRowCollection
    : ITypedList, ReadOnlyCollection<MyDataRow>,
        IList<MyDataRow>, IList
{
    private readonly MyDataTable _parent;
 
    public MyDataRowCollection(MyDataTable parent, IList<MyDataRow> rows)
        : base(rows)
    {
        _parent = parent;
    }
 
    public MyDataTable ParentTable { get { return _parent; } }
 
    PropertyDescriptorCollection ITypedList.GetItemProperties(
            PropertyDescriptor[] listAccessors)
    {
        return _parent.Columns;
    }
 
    string ITypedList.GetListName(PropertyDescriptor[] listAccessors)
    {
        return null;
    }
}
 
/// <summary>
/// The class that represents the data in a "row".
/// </summary>
public class MyDataRow : ICustomTypeDescriptor
{
    private readonly MyDataRowCollection _parentCollection;
    private readonly object[] _rows;
 
    internal MyDataRow(MyDataRowCollection parentCollection)
    {
        _parentCollection = parentCollection;
    }
 
    public object this[string name]
    {
        get { return _rows[ColumnIndexFromName(name)]; }
        set { _rows[ColumnIndexFromName(name)] = value; }
    }
 
    private int ColumnIndexFromName(string name)
    {
        PropertyDescriptor pd = _parentCollection.ParentTable.Columns[name];
        if (pd != null)
        {
            return _parentCollection.ParentTable.Columns.IndexOf(pd);
        }
        return -1;
    }
 
    AttributeCollection ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetAttributes()
    {
        return AttributeCollection.Empty;
    }
 
    string ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetClassName()
    {
        return typeof(MyDataRow).FullName;
    }
 
    string ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetComponentName()
    {
        return typeof(MyDataRow).Name;
    }
 
    TypeConverter ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetConverter()
    {
        return null;
    }
 
    EventDescriptor ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetDefaultEvent()
    {
        return null;
    }
 
    PropertyDescriptor ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetDefaultProperty()
    {
        return null;
    }
 
    object ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetEditor(Type editorBaseType)
    {
        return null;
    }
 
    EventDescriptorCollection ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetEvents(Attribute[] attributes)
    {
        return EventDescriptorCollection.Empty;
    }
 
    EventDescriptorCollection ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetEvents()
    {
        return EventDescriptorCollection.Empty;
    }
 
    PropertyDescriptorCollection ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetProperties(Attribute[] attributes)
    {
        return ((ITypedList)_parentCollection).GetItemProperties(null);
    }
 
    PropertyDescriptorCollection ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetProperties()
    {
        return ((ITypedList)_parentCollection).GetItemProperties(null);
    }
 
    object ICustomTypeDescriptor.GetPropertyOwner(PropertyDescriptor pd)
    {
        return this;
    }
}
 
/// <summary>
/// The class that represents information about a "column".
/// </summary>
public class MyDataColumn : PropertyDescriptor
{
    private readonly Type _propertyType;
 
    public MyDataColumn(string name, Type type, Attribute[] attrs) : base(name, attrs)
    {
        _propertyType = type;
    }
 
    public override object GetValue(object component)
    {
        return ((MyDataRow)component)[this.Name];
    }
 
    public override void SetValue(object component, object value)
    {
        ((MyDataRow)component)[this.Name] = value;
    }
 
    public override bool IsReadOnly
    {
        get { return false; }
    }
 
    public override Type PropertyType
    {
        get { return _propertyType; }
    }
 
    public override Type ComponentType
    {
        get { return typeof(MyDataRow); }
    }
 
    public override void ResetValue(object component)
    {
        throw new NotSupportedException();
    }
 
    public override bool CanResetValue(object component)
    {
        return false;
    }
 
    public override bool ShouldSerializeValue(object component)
    {
        return false;
    }
}

Now Use It

There is a lot that got glossed over here, but it’s a very deep subject. It amazes me how few .NET developers know about and make use of this layer (either by consuming objects in this fashion or by publishing objects that conform to this API), especially because there is so much buy-in from third-party vendors and projects, and especially because this is one of the few components of the binding API that has not had to change much at all between Windows Forms and WPF.

If you are working on an infrastructure project of any kind that purports to expose data to a .NET GUI (Windows Forms or WPF), absolutely make use of this in order to keep both your view and your data model as flexible and independent as possible; you’ll be happy you did. —DKT

by dkt

Of Magic and Properties in C# (and why Reflection isn’t the answer)

Reflection can be used to discover information about classes at runtime. And of course, you can use the Reflection API to cause all kinds of magic. You could iterate through a bunch of objects and output all of their property values. Or you could increment all the numeric properties by one. Or find all the properties tagged as [Bold] and draw them on the screen in a grid in a funny way. Or write each property-change value to a log file.

Considering the following class:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64

public class Order : DependencyObject, INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    public static readonly DependencyProperty SymbolProperty =
        DependencyProperty.Register(
            "Symbol", typeof(string), typeof(Order),
            new PropertyMetadata(null));
 
    private double _quantity;
    private OrderSide _side;
 
    public Order()
    {
        _quantity = 100.0;
    }
 
    public string Symbol
    {
        get { return (string)GetValue(SymbolProperty); }
        set { SetValue(SymbolProperty, value); }
    }
 
    [DefaultValue(100.0)]
    public double Quantity
    {
        get { return _quantity; }<br>
        set
        {
            if (_quantity != value)
            {
                _quantity = value;
                OnPropertyChanged(new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Quantity"));
            }
        }
    }
 
    [TypeConverter(typeof(OrderSideConverter))]
    public OrderSide Side
    {
        get { return _side; }
        set
        {
            if (_side != value)
            {
                _side = value;
                if (SideChanged != null)
                {
                    SideChanged(this, EventArgs.Empty);
                }
            }
        }
    }
 
    public event EventHandler SideChanged;
 
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
 
    protected virtual void OnPropertyChanged(PropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        if (PropertyChanged != null)
        {
            PropertyChanged(this, e);
        }
    }
}

We could easily figure out how to abstractly interact with a class like this…right?

What, really, is a property?

I suppose you could say it’s just a list of optional attributes, optional modifiers, a type, a property name, and a getter, setter, or both. But much as we argue to our Java counterparts that a property is more than a simple wrapping of a get() and set() method, a full-fledged property is a bit more than its individual curly braces and access modifiers. One of the biggest aspects of a real property is change notification, which is never actually part of the property declaration*. And judging from the pathological Order class that started the post, there are a lot of ways to skin that notifying cat. And I haven’t even mentioned the “fake” properties in things like a System.Data.DataTable, where the Reflection API is of no real use at all.

At a minimum, really, a property is a field that is:

  • observable
  • gettable, and optionally settable (fields that are settable and not gettable are weird and we won’t talk about them any more)
  • otherwise describable through custom attributes that provide additional metadata

More than just a “property”, and definitely more than what you get back when you reflect over a type and pull out all of its System.Reflection.PropertyInfos. And, again, reflecting over a DataTable tells you nothing about schema information at all.

If only there were a way of describing a property…

…oh wait, there is. There’s the System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptor class:

Although it may seem redundant to have two classes to describe properties, this isn’t quite the same information as can be retrieved through reflection. There is less emphasis on being an object model for compiled code and more emphasis on providing tools for abstractly working with properties—for example, there is no concept of access levels (if you’re holding an instance of PropertyDescriptor, it might as well be public). Some concepts exposed as Attributes become first-level concepts in this API (BrowsableAttribute, DisplayNameAttribute, TypeConverterAttribute become IsBrowsable, DisplayName, and Converter, for example). There is also a linkage to the event model that provides change notifications through AddValueChanged and RemoveValueChanged.

You could probably picture being able to build a generic grid based on nothing more than a list of objects and a list of PropertyDescriptors about them; in fact, that’s exactly what any grid worth its .NET salt does—from interacting with POCOs to DataTables. And a good portion of this API was driven by the requirements of the original Windows Forms Designer, one of the most “abstract” views of all.

To get a list of PropertyDescriptors, call one of the overloads of TypeDescriptor.GetProperties. You always get back an appropriate PropertyDescriptor for the “type” of the property—dependency properties give you back instances of DependencyPropertyDescriptor, and internal subclasses of PropertyDescriptors are returned for other properties (and they’ll properly take into account implementations of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface). In fact, one of the common methods for listening for changes in dependency properties is really just taking advantage of the fact that the PropertyDescriptor API provides a way for arbitrary clients to listen for changes in property values whereas DependencyProperty does not.

This is also the appropriate API that you should use when working with object models abstractly. Reflection isn’t going to always provide you all of the information you need, and you have a lot more to self-assemble. Reflection is also the slowest of all possibilities. Although much of the work done through PropertyDescriptors uses reflection under the hood, it doesn’t necessarily need to: interacting with DependencyProperty through this API requires no reflection, and calling DependencyPropertyDescriptor.GetValue(object) is a heck of a lot faster than calling the corresponding PropertyInfo.GetValue(object).

PropertyDescriptor is also a facet of the appropriate API when building an abstract data model—a model where the properties are not known at compile-time and instead drive controls at run-time. Building views that work off of this abstract data model have been done to death and there is almost never a reason to build your own any more**. Instead, next time I’ll cover the road less-travelled, your very own abstract data model. —DKT

*It’s actually a bit of a shame that the property syntax doesn’t support a built-in event that is every much as part of the property declaration as the getter and setter. Part of what makes a PropertyDescriptor necessary is exactly that the property definition isn’t the one-stop shop for everything property-related.

**Off the top of my head, System.Windows.Forms.DataGridView, Syncfusion, Infragistics support binding in Windows Forms, the WPF Toolkit grid for WPF, and ChartFX does an admirable WPF-y job for your charting needs.

by dkt

Finding all of the bindings on an object in WPF

Disclaimer: Don’t do it. Whatever brought you here, chances are you’re doing something wrong, because you’re most likely about to do something very gnarly that you shouldn’t be doing with your view and a whole pile of code-behind. You could make your viewmodel more intelligent, you could implement IDataErrorInfo or otherwise use an attached behavior and put your errors on the viewmodel where they belong—chances are, there is something that you could be doing that won’t require you to need to identify all of the bindings on an object.

That being said, here’s how it’s done.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

public static Dictionary<DependencyProperty, BindingBase> GetAllBindings(DependencyObject d)
{
    if (d == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("d");
    }
 
    var bindings = new Dictionary<DependencyProperty, BindingBase>();
    var lve = d.GetLocalValueEnumerator();
    while (lve.MoveNext())
    {
        DependencyProperty dp = lve.Current.Property;
        var expr = BindingOperations.GetBindingBase(d, dp);
        if (expr != null)
        {
            bindings.Add(dp, expr);
        }
    }
    return bindings;
}

If you are doing (or are thinking about doing) anything fancy with reflection to determine all properties and values on an object, you may want to consider using DependencyObjects instead. You get everything that DependencyObjects give you for free, and you can do everything without resorting to slow (and often obfuscating) reflection. —DKT

by dkt

Bindable Validation Errors

Wouldn’t it be great if you could do this in XAML:

1
2

<TextBox Text="{Binding Path=IngredientName}"
         Validation.Error="{Binding Path=IngredientNameError}"/>

Turns out you can:

1
2

<TextBox Text="{Binding Path=IngredientName}"
         vh:ValidationHelper.Error="{Binding Path=IngredientNameError}"/>
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Data;
 
namespace Pelebyte.ValidationUtils
{
  /// <summary>
  /// Provides validation helper methods and utilities.
  /// </summary>
  public static class ValidationHelper
  {
    /// <summary>
    /// The <see cref="DependencyProperty"/> that identifies the
    /// <see cref="P:ValidationHelper.Error"/> attached property.
    /// </summary>
    public static readonly DependencyProperty ErrorProperty =
      DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached(
        "Error", typeof(string), typeof(ValidationHelper),
        new PropertyMetadata(null, OnErrorChanged));
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Gets the custom error applied to the control.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="d">
    /// The control to get the current custom error for.
    /// </param>
    /// <returns>
    /// A string that represents the custom error.
    /// </returns>
    public static string GetError(DependencyObject d)
    {
      return (string)d.GetValue(ErrorProperty);
    }
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Sets the custom error applied to the control.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="d">
    /// The control to set the current custom error for.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="value">
    /// A string that represents the custom error. An empty or
    /// <c>null</c> string clears the error on the field.
    /// </param>
    public static void SetError(DependencyObject d, string value)
    {
      d.SetValue(ErrorProperty, value);
    }
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Called when the <see cref="P:ValidationHelper.Error"/>
    /// attached property changes value.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="d">
    /// The <see cref="DependencyObject"/> that is having its
    /// <see cref="P:ValidationHelper.Error"/> property changing
    /// values.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="e">
    /// The <see cref="DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs"/>
    /// instance containing the event data.
    /// </param>
    private static void OnErrorChanged(
      DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
      BindingExpressionBase expr;
 
        expr = BindingOperations.GetBindingExpressionBase(
          d, BindingErrorTargetProperty);
 
      if ((expr == null) && (e.NewValue != null))
      {
          // create a new binding between two properties that
          // we're only going to use so that we have an avenue
          // of our own to attach binding errors
          Binding b = new Binding();
          b.Source = d;
          b.Path = new PropertyPath(BindingErrorSourceProperty);
          b.Mode = BindingMode.OneWayToSource;
 
          b.ValidationRules.Add(new InternalRule(d));
 
          expr = BindingOperations.SetBinding(
              d, BindingErrorTargetProperty, b);
      }
 
        if (expr != null)
      {
        expr.UpdateSource();
      }
      }
    }
 
    /// <summary>
    /// The internal implementation of <see cref="ValidationRule"/>
    /// that returns our real "error" whenever we want.
    /// </summary>
    private sealed class InternalRule : ValidationRule
    {
      private readonly DependencyObject _d;
 
      /// <summary>
      /// Initializes a new instance of the
      /// <see cref="InternalRule"/> class specific to a
      /// particular object. The
      /// <see cref="P:ValidationHelper.Error"/> property of the
      /// given object will be used to determine the error on the
      /// object.
      /// </summary>
      /// <param name="d">
      /// The <see cref="DependencyObject"/> to return errors
      /// for.
      /// </param>
      public InternalRule(DependencyObject d)
      {
        _d = d;
      }
 
      public override ValidationResult Validate(
          object value, CultureInfo cultureInfo)
      {
        // completely ignore /value/ and look for the error
        // on the DependencyObject that was given to us in
        // our constructor
        string error = GetError(_d);
 
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(error))
        {
          // an empty or null string means no error
          return ValidationResult.ValidResult;
        }
        else
        {
          // anything else means an error
          return new ValidationResult(false, error);
        }
      }
    }
 
    // two private dependency properties that we use internally to
    // set up our useless binding
 
    private static readonly DependencyProperty
      BindingErrorSourceProperty =
        DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached(
          "BindingErrorSource", typeof(object),
          typeof(ValidationHelper),
          new PropertyMetadata(null));
 
    private static readonly DependencyProperty
      BindingErrorTargetProperty =
        DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached(
          "BindingErrorTarget", typeof(object),
          typeof(ValidationHelper),
          new PropertyMetadata(null));
  }
}

Why it works

The System.Windows.Controls.Validation.Errors property is a collection for a reason—it’s a collection of all of the binding errors on the object.

For most controls, it’s not readily apparent that more than one binding on the same control could actually fail:

1

<TextBox Text="{Binding Path=IngredientName, ValidatesOnDataErrors=True}"/>

But if you had a complex control where more than one property was controlled directly by the user, it’s more obvious why you’d possibly need a collection instead of a single object:

1
2
3
4
5

<!-- this slider has two thumbs; the user drags both of
     them around to specify a range -->
<my:DoubleSlider
    MinValue="{Binding Path=Minimum, ValidatesOnDataErrors=True}"
    MaxValue="{Binding Path=Maximum, ValidatesOnDataErrors=True}"/>

If both of these properties had errors, WPF would collect both of them in Validation.Errors.

So the ValidationHelper code above is essentially emulating the following XAML snippet in C# (note that the code in green isn’t actually possible—that’s why we’re writing this code in C#):

<TextBox x:Name="MyTextBox"
Text="{Binding Path=IngredientName, ValidatesOnDataErrors=True}"
<vh:ValidationHelper.BindingErrorTarget>
<Binding Source="MyTextBox"
Path="(vh:ValidationHelper.BindingErrorSource)">
Mode="OneWayToSource"
<vh:ValidationHelper+InternalRule (MyTextBox)>
</Binding>
</vh:ValidationHelper.BindingErrorTarget>
</TextBox>

(It may help at this point to open another a window with my little sketch of how WPF data binding data flows around.)

Our hidden BindingErrorTarget property participates in validation just like a regular property. So when the value of ValidationHelper.Error is changed:

  1. Force the binding on ValidationHelper.BindingErrorTarget to be re-evaluated from the target back to the source (call BindingExpression.UpdateSource()).
  2. Our validation rule InternalRule gets called as part of the normal validation process; our rule will return ValidationHelper.Error instead of validating the incoming value.

It doesn’t actually matter what the values of the BindingErrorTarget and BindingErrorSource properties are; they only exist so that we can key into the binding system.

Why?

IDataErrorInfo and ValidatesOnDataErrors would seemingly make this technique redundant: why go through all this trouble to expose a binding site for errors on the viewmodel when you could just implement IDataErrorInfo?

  • IDataErrorInfo is only consulted when the source property changes value—if you have a data source whose errors can dynamically change independently of the source property, there isn’t a clean way from the viewmodel to force the view to pick up your changes in the error. (If your source implements INotifyPropertyChanged, you can raise PropertyChanged for the relevant property, but if you use DependencyObjects, there is no way to force the binding system to re-evaluate the property from the viewmodel—you’d need the BindingExpression, which then requires your viewmodel to have knowledge of the view).
  • It may be inconvenient or impossible from a design standpoint to have the object containing your error property to also implement IDataErrorInfo.
    If your error comes from a different object than your viewmodel, then your implementation of IDataErrorInfo would need to know where to fetch it.
  • If you ever had a situation where you had a ValidationRule that you wanted to bind to, you’ve probably discovered that it’s never going to happen—ValidationRule, not being a DependencyObject, doesn’t support binding—not in code, and certainly not in XAML. An attached behavior or subclass (you never need to subclass in WPF) is really your only recourse for situations like this.
  • You don’t want to rely on .NET 3.0 SP1 or .NET 3.5 SP1. Thankfully, Windows 7 comes out of the box with it, but Vista, and certainly XP, do not. This technique works with every version of WPF.

Remember that any DependencyProperty that is the target of a binding can hold validation errors; also remember that you can add attached properties to any object. That means you can add arbitrary validation errors to any DependencyObject through this trick. You can also drive this error generation off of whatever you want—I chose the simplest example and created an attached property specifically to hold an error that will be reported, unchanged, right back through the binding system. You could create a new attached behavior, have the TextBox.Text property and TextBox.TextChanged event drive the error; then set up an attached behavior that provides validation on the text of the TextBox without having to provide an instance of ValidationRule. —DKT

In the interests of not cluttering the picture, I left out a little magic trick:

  • We could attach a converter to the binding where IValueConverter.ConvertBack() returns Binding.DoNothing; this would stop data from ever flowing to the source.
  • Then we could actually drop the BindingErrorSource property and reuse an existing one (like Tag or something), knowing that our binding will never actually change the value or otherwise interfere with it.

And why use two properties when you could get away with just one?

Sep 24: Updated the OnErrorChanged to fix a bug that would cause the error state to never actually clear…whoops! –DKT

by dkt

Data Flow in a WPF BindingExpression

I was writing up some posts on how ValidationRules work, and of course, I ended up confusing myself, because data binding can get confusing once you start throwing in IValueConverters, ValidationRules, target objects, source objects…yikes.

So I decided to sketch out a simple diagram for my own benefit. And after 15 minutes, I realized it wasn’t so simple:





Click the image for a larger version

Hope it helps make WPF binding less confusing… —DKT