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We're a small group of developers who make software for the App Store and Microsoft Store. Through this blog, we aim to provide guides relating to the development of Windows, Xbox, iOS and MacOS apps. Specifically, we aim to create guides on topics for which there is not a lot of public information already available to provide a source for other developers to learn about these topics.


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Popular posts from this blog

How to enable dark title bar in Windows Forms and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) apps

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Windows has had a dark mode feature for a long time now, however, as a Windows Forms and/or WPF developer, you may have noticed that the Windows dark mode does not affect your app at all automatically - in fact the Windows dark mode only affects UWP, WinUI and Chromium based user interfaces - there's no support for Windows dark mode in Windows Forms and WPF. Luckily, it is very easy to determine if dark mode is currently enabled and be notified any time dark mode is switched on or off - from there it's just a matter of updating your UI to match which mode Windows is in. While this may work fine for the client area of your app (i.e. the area of your app that does not include the title bar and border), you don't have a lot of control over the non-client area of your app and you'll notice that by default, the title bar and border of any Windows Forms or WPF window will not adjust to dark mode regardless of the user's dark mode settings. Luckily, Windows includes a func
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How to show placeholder text in a WPF textbox

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Sometimes, when you have a text box in a user interface, you may want to add placeholder text to that text box to give users a prompt as to what to enter into the text box. If you've ever used UWP or WinUI, you'll probably have noticed that the default text box elements provide a PlaceholderText property that provides this functionality. However, WPF and Windows Forms don't provide this functionality by default. Luckily, thanks to WPF's rendering capabilities, it is quite easy to set up placeholder text manually. If you're using Windows Forms, you can make use of the ElementHost to use a WPF TextBox. Typically, placeholder text is a slightly faded colour compared to user-entered text to help distinguish it and only shows when no text is entered into the text box. An example is below: How to show placeholder text in a WPF TextBox To show placeholder text in a WPF textbox, all we need to do is show a partially transparent, intangible Label above the TextBox like so (Y
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How to enable precision scrolling in a WPF app on Windows

The Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF for short is a powerful platform for creating applications in Windows. Introduced in the .NET Framework 3.0 along with Windows Vista in 2006, WPF included an overhault to rendering user interfaces compared to its alternatives at the time, such as GDI (Graphics Driver Interface) and Windows Forms.  Although modern back in 2006, WPF is starting to show its age in modern versions of Windows. One of the areas where WPF shows its age is in scrolling. Although still common, the traditional mouse and keyboard is not the only way to control a Windows computer - touch screens, pens and touchpads are other ways in which a user can send input to a computer. If you have ever tried scrolling a scroll viewer in WPF using a touchpad or precision mouse, you would have noticed how over sensitive the scrolling is; this is not an issue with the mouse or touchpad, nor is it an issue with Windows, this is an issue with WPF ignoring an important value, known as th
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