Skip to main content

WPF vNext: Microsoft will solve the ‘Airspace problem’

If you ever tried to combine multiple UI technologies like WPF and WinForms, you sooner or later are confronted with the ‘Airspace problem’. “Airspace" is a conceptual way of thinking about how the two halves of an interoperation application share the rendering areas within a common top-level window. This article explains how the "airspace" concept might influence the presentation design as well as the input considerations for your WPF interoperation application.

Practically speaking, this means that WinForms content hosted in a WindowsFormsHost always appears on top of WPF content. So if you are using WPF adorners they will appear to be "trimmed" if they hit up against a WinForms region in your app. There are some tricks to tackle this issue, but none of them are really clean.

On the screenshot below you see that the calendar control on the left hosted in a WindowsFormsHost is not overlayed by the red bar although it has the highest z-index defined in XAML.

At PDC 2010, Rob Relyea announced that they will try to tackle this issue in WPF 4. I guess it will not be easy, but if they succeed, they’ll have at least one happy customer…

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.