Interprocess Communication with WCF - Part 2

In Part 1 I showed you how you can use WCF with named pipes to send messages from a client to a server. Now I will show you how we can modify that code to send messages in the other direction, from the server back to the client. We do this by creating a callback interface and referencing it in our service contract. We then implement the callback interface in our client.

Interprocess Communication with WCF - Part 1

With the introduction of Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation from .NET 3.0 onwards we have been provided with a powerful framework for communicating across process boundaries, whether they are on the same machine, the same network or even across the internet. A huge range of configuration options are available for the many scenarios that WCF can be used as part of our solution and they can seem overwhelming to begin with.

MVVM - Binding to TreeView.SelectedItem

At first, binding to the TreeView's SelectedItem property sounds like a simple task, but if you give it a go you will soon realise it's not so straight forward. That's because the WPF TreeView's SelectedItem property is read-only so we can't set the binding in XAML like normal.

WPF - Different Data Templates for Different Child Types in a TreeView

The TreeView control in WPF allows us to display hierarchical data and allows us to customise the appearance of this by setting the ItemTemplate property using a HierarchicalDataTemplate, giving us expandable nodes within our tree. However, we can only set the ItemTemplate property once with one data template. Imagine the scenario where you want to display a directory structure. A directory can contain files or other directories which in turn can also contain files or other directories and so on. You might want to use a different data template for files than for directories but as stated earlier you can only set the ItemTemplate property once, so how can we achieve this?

CallerMemberName .NET 4.0

After writing my recent post about a basic ViewModelBase implementation, the discussion about the CallerMemberNameAttribute got me thinking... how hard would it be to write my own implementation of this attribute?

MVVM - ViewModelBase

If you are developing a WPF application then you really need to be using the MVVM(Model-View-ViewModel) design pattern. I'm sure the vast majority of prospective employers searching for a WPF developer well expect some familiarity with MVVM. I'm not going to spend hours explaining this design pattern as many people have already done that rather well such as here and here.

WPF - Find Parent by Type

Building on from my earlier post here I thought I'd show how we can use VisualTreeHelper to go the other way up the tree and find a parent of a specified type.