The Digital Tool Factory Blog

The Problem: You need to conditionally bold text in a text block, but you cannot find any way of doing so

The Cause: For inexplicable reasons, Microsoft chose not to include a FontWeight.Bold in their xaml specification

The Solution: Microsoft did include a FontWeights (note the S) class  To bold text in the codebehind, all you have to do is write this

tbbDownloader.FontWeight = FontWeights.Bold;

And presto!  Bold Text.

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

The Problem: You try to set margins the same way in xaml as in xhtml/css.

The Cause: The margin property in xaml is different than the margin in xhtml/css

The Solution: Use this bit of info: the margins in xaml go left,top,right,bottom, or clockwise from 9:00.

This was hardly the most significant problem I had with the new app, but it did take me a little while to figure out, so I thought I would blog it in case someone else had the same problem.

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

The Problem: Your code goes about it’s merry way, adding children to parents and so forth when you get the error

Value does not fall within the expected range

The Cause: The problem is caused by two objects having the same name in the same parent. If your canvas has two StackPanels named “spOverlap” then this error is thrown. Why the error message couldn’t just say “Duplicate Name Error” no one knows. I’ve encountered this error when dynamically adding controls to the application.

The Solution (Part 1): The simple way to fix it is to simply name the newly added control with a guid or a ID number of some sort.

The Cause (Part 2): I did in fact do that, and then encountered another error, namely that things were expanding exponentially.

Here’s the situation. I have a main control (call it StronScreen), which will spawn a child control (call it StronTab), which has an event (call it StronEntityAdd) that will add a control (call it StronEntity) to StronScreen. I was adding the event to StronTab every time I spawned it, which meant that there were multiple events attached to StronTab as the user went through the application. It worked fine the first time, by which I mean that it added a single instance of StronEntity to StronScreen. The next time I spawned StronTab (this is a necessary and desirable feature of the application) and call StronEntityAdd TWO instances of StronEntity would be added to StronScreen.

The Solution (Part 2): Create the event handler as null when the page is loaded, and when StronTab is called, check to see if the event is null, and if it is, add it to StronTab. If the event handler is not null, then simply don’t add it.

A hard problem to diagnose, and the application does have to work that way, but that fixes it.

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog