OrangeFlash

Previous parts:

• Blend For ActionScript Coders #1: MouseEvents.
• Blend For ActionScript Coders #2: List Controls.

I think we are quite ready for our first application in Blend, that is RSS Reader, we also “meet” closer with XAML today.

Idea

Ok, our current RSS reader should be really simple, since this is our first time with layout in Blend. I say, we need one TextBox (something like TextInput\TextArea in Flex), one Button, and ListBox which will hold data from RSS feed. We Also have to create some custom class which will present every feed item in appropriate form, but this is another story.
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I’ve just revamped my blog :D

• Found new cool theme - Vistered Little
• Painted new cool theme to be more Orange :D
• Edited Flath Text Formater:
• Recompiled it for Flash 8, since this blog is about Flex and NET you should have FP9 by now.
• Added “Copy Code” button to context menu.
• Now FTF resizes nicely in all browsers (there were some issues with FF3\IE7).

Feel free to submit bugs.

Previous part.

This is second tutorial about Microsoft Blend, I strongly recommend you to read previous part of this tutorial, you may find some basic information about editing code, basis of C# syntax and some links.

In this tutorial we will learn how to use list based controls in .Net and also how to load an images in System.Windows.Controls.Image control. Lets create new project called “List” in Blend and open in your C# IDE.
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Sometimes you might want to create different item renderers in a single list-based control i.e. in application form, here is my way of creating it. Basicaly we’ll use single class ItemContainer, but I’ve also created bunch of utility classes which might help me in future. So here they are:

• ItemContainer: This is Canvas subclass. We will create actualItemRenderer in this container. And this container will play as ItemRenderer for List.
• ItemContainerData: This is replacement for data property, it has itemRenderer and data properties, used by ItemContainer.
• InitFactory: ClassFactory subclass, which has one more property - initObject, this is very similar to initObject from ActionScript 2.0 in methods like MovieClip.attachMovie.

The whole idea is to create special ItemRenderer that can “emulate” other controls, in my case it is subclass of Canvas which simply creates a specific UI control adds it to display list . Then we are to let the container know which renderer is to emulate, for this purpose I use ItemContainerData with special fields.

Sources and examples:

Example
Sources
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In List based controls from Flex Framework, we aren’t allowed to create itemRenderers with different size, due to the way Lists are scrolled (we scroll model instead of view). But sometimes we just have to do this, for example if we want to fill List with different images, or text with different formatting.

So I’ve decided to create List-Like component based on VBox, which has dataProvider and itemRenderer properties, and can render items with different sizes, which looks like this:

Download Examples
Example

In ActionScript 1-2, we often needed to create preloader for images, because we couldn’t show them while loading were in progress. ActionScript 3.0 changes this, with ByteArray and URLStream classes we can work with bytes instead of files.

That means that we can show half of the image, or different states of progressive JPEG file.
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I dont like the way we create and modify items with ContextMenu class in ActionScript 3.0, first we have to create item, then add event listener, then push our item to ContextMenu.customItems, I think this is quite alot of code for simple task. And there is one more disadvanage, we cannot subclass ContextMenu items, this means we cannot create subclass which would add some items by default.

All this inspired me to create my own class which would manage ContextMenu instance. Then I’ve added methods like remove, insert, getItem.
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In this tutorial we’ll create our own supprot for back button in Adobe Flex applications. We have a very usefull class in Flex Framework - HistoryManager.

In fact, we just have to register a class in HistoryManager, and implement 2 methods inside it, saveState and loadState. See it in action.

By the way Accordion and TabNavigator have HistoryManager supprot by default.
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