// do something here

Regular expressions all by themselves have the magical ability to amaze and confound all at the same time. Throw in a dash of .NET string interpretation and you have a recipe for pulling out the remaining hair that you might have on your head.

So I was trying to use a regex to do some searching inside of a large string for strings inside curly braces, such as {this} and {these three words}. My string matching routine would return “this” and “these three words”, without the quotes of course. It took a bit of trial and error, but here is the important stuff for the routine that I put together to accomplish this task:

const string pattern = @"\{([^\}]+)\}";
foreach (Match match in Regex.Matches(theLargeString, pattern))
{
    Console.WriteLine("Found a field match: " + match);
}

BTW, a special birthday shout out to one of the mega stars of our generation, who turns 50 years young today. Happy birthday, Larry The Cable Guy.

I have been doing a lot of work in WPF lately, and it is a different animal.

The default styles of a button did not look right for my application, so I came up with the following XAML that styles up all of the button objects in my application:

<Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
    <Setter Property="SnapsToDevicePixels" Value="true"/>
    <Setter Property="OverridesDefaultStyle" Value="true"/>
    <Setter Property="Background" Value="CornflowerBlue" />
    <Setter Property="Template">
        <Setter.Value>
            <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
                <Border x:Name="Border" CornerRadius="0" BorderThickness="0" 
                            Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding Background}">
                    <ContentPresenter Margin="2" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" RecognizesAccessKey="True" />
                </Border>
                <ControlTemplate.Triggers>
                    <Trigger Property="IsMouseOver" Value="true">
                        <Setter TargetName="Border" Property="Background" Value="#4667A5" />
                    </Trigger>
                    <Trigger Property="IsPressed" Value="true">
                        <Setter TargetName="Border" Property="Background" Value="#3C588C" />
                    </Trigger>
                    <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="false">
                        <Setter TargetName="Border" Property="Background" Value="LightGray" />
                        <Setter TargetName="Border" Property="BorderBrush" Value="#AAAAAA" />
                        <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="DarkGray"/>
                    </Trigger>
                    <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="true">
                        <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="White"/>
                    </Trigger>
                </ControlTemplate.Triggers>
            </ControlTemplate>
        </Setter.Value>
    </Setter>
</Style>

As you can see, I am using TemplateBinding to bind to the desired background color.

However, in one of my user controls, I want to be able to change the background color of the button in certain situations. Initially, I just created a copy of the above XAML, gave it a Key, and then used that key name to style up the Buttons that I wanted to.

As always, there is a better way. I found that there was a way to use a BasedOn in my new style to pull in the style from the global resources and just change what I needed, here is what it looks like:

<Style x:Key="SpecialButton" TargetType="Button" BasedOn="{StaticResource {x:Type Button}}">
    <Setter Property="Width" Value="20" />
    <Setter Property="Visibility" Value="Collapsed" />
    <Setter Property="Content" Value=">" />
    <Setter Property="IsTabStop" Value="False" />
    <Setter Property="Background" Value="LightGray" />
</Style>

BTW, Happy Birthday to Eugene Levy, by far one of the funniest actors out there.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you are using a SQL Server Compact database in your C# .NET application, and your User table has nvarchar fields that are nullable, and your User class doesn’t care if those fields are null, it just wants empty strings instead.

Sadly to say, you are eventually going to end up with nulls in those fields, and as a result, if you use a SqlCeDataReader to step through a record set, this kind of stuff will (at some point) give you a runtime error:

myUser.UserName = (string)dataReader["UserName"]);

So I started looking for the best way to handle this problem. What I didn’t want to do was this for every single string field assignment:

myUser.UserName = (System.DBNull.Value == dataReader["UserName"] ? "" : dataReader["UserName"]);

This seems a bit wasteful to me, as the data reader is accessed twice. Sure, I could have encapsulated this into a function to pretty up the code a bit, but that would just be hiding the ugliness. Then, it occurred to me to try the Convert class to see what would happen, and it turns out that this code knows how to convert a DBNull to an empty string:

myUser.UserName = Convert.ToString(dataReader["UserName"]);

The Convert class may in fact do the same thing as I have shown above, but I would hope that Microsoft would make their built in function better than something that I would just hack together.

BTW, I hope everyone out there has voted, this is an important election. (Finally, tomorrow I can watch TV or get the mail without being bombarded by increasingly stupider campaign and “issue” advertisements.)

The Telerik ChartView control is nice, but if you cannot create your XAML ahead of time (or in other words, you don’t know how many LineSeries you are going to have on your chart), then you are in uncharted territory. Especially if you are not super solid in WPF and data binding as I am.

Using their example code, I was able to get the track ball info to show the date and value of the data points (basically the X and Y values of the data point), but instead I wanted to show a label for that LineSeries along with the Y value. Initially I tried to use a DataTemplate in the Resources of my user control, but I could not get the binding to work the way I wanted to.

Finally, to solve this issue, I had to resort to build the XAML in my code and set the TrackBallInfoTemplate. Here is what it looks like:

// the class holding the data for the chart...
public class SalesInfo
{
    public string Employee { get; set; }
    public DateTime Time { get; set; }
    public int Value { get; set; }
}
 
// then, further on down the code...
Color[] colorArray = { Colors.Red, Colors.Green, Colors.Blue, Colors.Yellow };
 
// and...
data = new RadObservableCollection(data.OrderBy(x => x.Time));
Color dataColor = colorArray[loopCounter % 4];
LineSeries line = new LineSeries();
line.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(dataColor);
line.StrokeThickness = 2;
line.CategoryBinding = new PropertyNameDataPointBinding() { PropertyName = "Time" };
line.ValueBinding = new PropertyNameDataPointBinding() { PropertyName = "Value" };
line.ItemsSource = data;
 
StringBuilder templateString = new StringBuilder();
templateString.Append("<DataTemplate xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation'>");
templateString.Append("<StackPanel Orientation='Horizontal'>");
templateString.Append("<TextBlock Text='" + u + "' />");  // u refers to the name of this line series (Employee)
templateString.Append("<TextBlock Text=': ' />");
templateString.Append("<TextBlock Text='{Binding DataPoint.Value}' />");
templateString.Append("</StackPanel>");
templateString.Append("</DataTemplate>");
 
var xml = XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(templateString.ToString()));
var tbiTemplate = (DataTemplate)XamlReader.Load(xml) as DataTemplate;
line.TrackBallInfoTemplate = tbiTemplate;
myTelerikChartView.Series.Add(line);

And so now, here is what my chart view looks like with the customized track ball info:

BTW, Happy Birthday to Ty Tabor.

EDIT: I would like to take a moment to say thanks to Yavor from Telerik, he responded to my posting on the Telerik forums and pointed out that the DataPoint object has a DataItem object child that is the object that created the DataPoint. As a result, in my XAML Resources, I can bind to DataPoint.DataItem.Employee, and it works as expected. Here is that link:

Creating LineSeries programmatically with custom TrackBallInfoTemplate

So I am looking around for some ideas on making this WPF based application for Windows that I am working on look slightly less sucky. And I see some nifty themes on this web page:

WPF Themes

And I am thinking that would be pretty cool to just swap in one line in the App.xaml file, and my whole app would look different.

Cool in theory, but some implementation details are a bit fuzzy.

Here is what I did to get it working with VS 2010 Ultimate:

• Install the WPF Toolkit by clicking on the big purple “download” button on the above web site
• Download the themes xaml files by going to this web site: WP Futures (scroll down to WP Themes and click the link to download the zip file)
• Unzip the downloaded file and add the needed xaml files to your WPF project
• Add a reference to WPF Toolkit in your application’s References folder
• Add a ResourceDictionary line to the Application.Resources section of your App.xaml file to make it look like the one shown on the WPF Themes page above

Keep in mind that if you put your xaml theme files in a folder off the root of your project, you will need to adjust the Source property of the ResourceDictionary. For example, I put the xaml theme files in a Themes folder off the root of the project, so the Source for me looks like this:

<ResourceDictionary Source="/Themes/ExpressionDark.xaml" />

BTW, Happy Birthday to John Petrucci, who is quite clearly not a native of this planet.

It was a fun time today attending the Stir Trek developer event in Columbus, Ohio. I especially enjoyed the Scott Hanselman sessions on becoming more productive and on ASP.NET. And the movie was real loud.

Also, I would like to thank all the people who downloaded my Stir Trek app for the iPhone. Yesterday’s download count was almost larger than the entire download count for the Stir Trek app I did in 2011.

BTW, to continue the movie theme, Happy Star Wars day to everyone.

Jennifer Marsman gave a rousing and lengthy presentation on Metro and Windows 8 last night to a packed house meeting of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group. She almost makes me want to do a Metro app.

Prizes returned, and believe it or not, my name was drawn first for the door prizes. I think that it is a conspiracy that the prizes really suck when I win something. I walked away with a version 2 Code Complete book. And a cheer went up from the audience.

BTW, happy birthday to Ace Frehley, a true rock and roll icon. It was kind of a shame that Ace wasn’t playing with Kiss when they did the Dancing With The Stars Rock Week show a couple of weeks ago.

Last night, I was in attendance at a packed house meeting of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group. The main topic was WCF by Paul Bahler, and the content was very informative. Almost a bit too informative, as he spent most of his time in Visual Studio showing how to do various tasks in the wonderful world of web services.

Unfortunately, there were no prizes to be had at the meeting (unless you count the Donato’s pizza), as the CONDG president forgot the prize box. There were calls for an impeachment.

BTW, happy birthday to David Tom, who I actually liked playing Billy Abbott on Y&R.

Sorry about the delay in between posts kiddies, I have been very busy at work with Routzy and playing baseball at Pirates Fantasy Camp. Hopefully soon the Routzy app will be approved and I will be able to return to a more normal pattern of posting.

In the mean time, if you have a Windows Azure web site or services, and you want to secure them with an SSL certificate, I found this blog post to be indispensable:

Windows Azure: Secure Site with SSL certificate

BTW, a big shout out to Ohio’s own John Glenn, who, 50 years ago today, orbited the earth for almost 5 hours, a tremendous feat for the time.

Samidip Basu gave a very informative presentation on OData as it applied to the Columbus M3 Conference that took place in November of 2011, and how he put together a Windows Phone app that consumed the Azure hosted data.

As it was at the December CONDG meeting two years ago, I won a totally crappy T-shirt, and gave it to a former co-worker. Which made the evening that much more successful.

BTW, Happy Birthday to the Petrified Forest National Park, established this day in 1962. The petrified logs and the Painted Desert are fantastic, I highly recommend a trip there.