Nicke Andersson

A rating control in XAML

For a pet project I've been working on in WPF I needed a control that would let the user provide a rating between 0 and 5, for example like the one in iTunes and on numerous web sites:

After googling a bit I found some samples, including this one posted by Zhou Yong on msdn forums.

However, there was some issues with the functionality (how it reacts to clicks when you click a star that is already lit) and the visuals (the starts themselves and some other minor issues relating to sizing and scaling) so I decided to touch it up a bit. The end result looks like this:

It (like the original) is based on toggle buttons with a new template to redo the visuals. It quite nicely illustrates the power of templates in WPF, and what can be achieved just with a little bit of code in a user control. The template looks like this:

   1: <ControlTemplate x:Key="starTemplate"  TargetType="{x:Type ToggleButton}">

   2:     <Viewbox>

   3:         <Path Name="star" Fill="Gray" Data="F1 M 145.637,174.227L 127.619,110.39L 180.809,70.7577L 114.528,68.1664L 93.2725,5.33333L 70.3262,67.569L 4,68.3681L 56.0988,109.423L 36.3629,172.75L 91.508,135.888L 145.637,174.227 Z"/>

   4:     </Viewbox>

   5:     <ControlTemplate.Triggers>

   6:         <Trigger Property="IsChecked" Value="True">

   7:             <Setter TargetName="star" Property="Fill" Value="White"/>

   8:         </Trigger>

   9:     </ControlTemplate.Triggers>

  10: </ControlTemplate>

When working on this I realized how hard it is to find coordinates for a star. The ones I ended up using were lifted from a blog post by Jaime Rodriguez. They are a little bit crooked, but they were the best I could find.

 

Of course the whole control should ideally be implemented as a custom control so that it properly supports styles and templating, but I'll leave that exercise for later.

The code for this sample can be downloaded from here.

Microsoft made me lose my virginity

Or rather, it was my computer that lost its virginity. You see, I had a nice, pristine, clean computer, without any open source software on it whatsoever. It was a completely commercial experience. I loved it. And MSDN Subscriber Downloads ruined it.

You see, Microsoft has started to use the Akamai Download Manager for distributing files. I wanted to download SP1 for Vista, but Akamai refuses to play nice on Vista, and can't save files because it seems IE won't let it (at least on Vista). I'm sure this can be fixed somehow, but I didn't figure out how. It's really nice how they use a program that doesn't work well under Vista to distribute SP1 for Vista.

So what I ended up doing in order to get the beastly Akamai to work was to install Firefox, and use it to download SP1. I will never hear the end of this at work.