Using WPF and Vector Graphics

Recently I’ve been taking a look at WPF, Microsoft’s not so new now replacement for WinForms.  With the little free time that I have, I’ve relied heavily on Pluralsight for getting up to speed on various technologies.  In working with WPF, I was trying to leverage their concept of “lookless” controls which is very powerful and much nicer to design with than WinForms. 

To summarize my tribulations, I was having a hard time loading a local resource that was a SVG.  Blend Expression, a WPF designer, doesn’t support SVG directly but it does support .pdf (a form of SVG) and .ai (Adobe Illustration).  There are a couple of ways to product .pdf or .ai files.  My approach was to use a tool I’ve used in the past, Inkscape, see Inkscape A Cool Tool.  Inkscape also support generating a XAML file directly from the SVG file which you can leverage directory or copy the contents of XAML output into a resource dictionary.

1.  Open or create your SVG file in Inkscape.

2.  PDF format: Select Save As and choose .pdf format.  It will display a dialog as below once you click Save, ensure you select “Convert texts to paths”, then click OK.  Once the file is saved you can rename the file extension from .pdf to .ai.  It will now be recognized in Expression Blend.

 

3.  XAML format:  Select Save As and choose .xaml format.  This will export it directly to a XAML file.  You can take the content line, element is a ViewBox, and put that directory in a resource file.

Outlook 2013 Always Prompts for Credentials using Active Directory

You ever have those technical issues that aren’t quit annoying enough to deal with in your normal day of busyness?  I really have enjoyed where Microsoft have taken Office in the last few years, but after installing Office 2013 Professional, which has Outlook 2013, I kept receiving a login prompt for my Active Directory credentials every time I open Outlook.  For a while, I thought it was something to do with our IT’s exchange server, but did a little googling to figure it out. 

It turns out that if you have Exchange connected through HTTP, it will always prompt, even if you ask it to remember you credentials, or even tell it not to prompt!  How annoying.  Below is the image of the setting you need to uncheck to fix this pest of an issue.

You can get to this screen by going to: Account Settings, double click the mail account in question, click the More Settings… button, then click the Connection tab.

Sass CSS with Compass using Grunt Not Working on Windows

My team is using AngularJS, Node.js, Grunt, Sass CSS via Compass, Yoeman, and a few other web toolsets.  The other day when running the serve process to generate the css output from Sass CSS, the css wasn’t able to generate.  It turned out that Compass was setting the permissions on the .tmp folder where it puts the CSS to a state that didn’t all the process to write the file, hence a Permission Denied error.  To fix this issue I followed the StackOverflow thread http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22596760/yeoman-error-errnoeacces-on-line-897-of-c-permission-denied which did these steps.

Open a command prompt and run the following.

1. gem uninstall sass (if you have multiple version, select all)
2. gem uninstall compass
3. gem install compass --pre
4. gem install sass --pre

Setting Up PhoneGap/Cordova for Visual Studio

It’s always a struggle to find time to invest in side projects when you work and play an active role in your kids lives.  I appreciate when installing tools is just simple and you don’t have to google “why doesn’t …. do …” or “where is…” because the instructions aren’t straight forward or are missing steps/pieces.  I found this the case with the latest phonegap instructions as of 2014-3-9.

1. Install Windows SDK.  I’m using Windows 7.1 because I have a Win7 machine, I found SDK here.  This installed Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (VS2010).
2. Download PhoneGap SDK and unzip in C:\Tools.  PhoneGap SDK is on github here.
3. In the C:\Tools\phonegap-master (you might have to drill down a bit) there will be a lib folder, and in it there are folders for the different target frameworks one of which is “windows-phone”.  As of recent the Visual Studio template .zip is not there.  I had to run a batch filed called “createTemplates.bat” which created templates for WP8 and WP7.
4. Once you have the Visual Studio .zip file template(s), copy those to your \Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#.
5. Open VS2010 and create a new project.  You will now see a project template as shown below.  The template name may change at some point.

 

The project structure will look like the following.

• cordova – build tools
• cordovalib – code for browser engine interaction
• www – folder for html/js/css of your app
• plugins – plugins for interfaces on your phone (i.e. camera, contacts)