Shannon Braun's Weblog

Here is the presentation that I did today at the Microsoft office in Minneapolis today.  It was a segment on real world WPF.  It discusses how WPF isn't just about the cool North Face demo or the New York Times Reader, but there is advantages for using it in every day enterprise applications.  The presentation and source can be found below.  The demo's include sample WPF implementations for Authorization, Application Activity Monitoring and Highlighted Search similar to what you experience when you search in Outlook.  None of the examples are currently at production quality, but with a little polish they could get there.

Authorization UI

Demonstrates how to use attached properties on different UI elements to change whether they are hidden or disabled based on the users authorization for a specific UI Element.  The authorization UI is mocked up, but should give you an idea of how you can extend any UI Element with property metadata to help in the UI authorization scenario.

Application Activity Monitoring

Demonstrates how you can implement monitoring of the mouse and keyboard to determine if you should disable the UI of the application... in this implementation it will blur after 5 seconds of no activity.  This implementation still needs some work... you can still edit data after the screen has blurred and there is no login dialog which would pop up after the blur has taken place so you can resume work.

Highlighted Search

Similar to how Microsoft Outlook highlights the search term as you type, this implementation demonstrates a simplified version using a listbox.  There is a bunch of sample data... you can test it out with up to 10,000 records.  If you want to generate more seed data, you can use the seed data api that I put together.