It's time for another July TechNet Guru winner!

Congratulations to Magnus (MM8), our WPF Guru winner for July! See the TechNet Guru Contributions for July 2013.

Magnus' Blog: http://blog.magnusmontin.net/

Here is the gold-medal-winning article:

WPF/MVVM: Binding the IsChecked Property of a CheckBox to Several Other CheckBoxes

Now let's look at all the winning articles:

WPF Technical Guru - July 2013

Gold Award Winner

Magnus MM8 (Magnus Montin)

WPF/MVVM: Binding the IsChecked property of a CheckBox to several other CheckBoxes

AN: "Very detailed, nice images, excellent explanations"
Ed Price: "Strong introduction and good explanations for each code snippet. Terrific!"

Silver Award Winner

XAML guy (Peter Laker)

WPF Data, Item and Control Templates - Minimum code, maximum awesome

AN: "Love the animated gif/video. Great introduction to WPF"
Ed Price: "Good workflow and the animated GIF is great! The introduction could use more of an explanation of the scenarios and problems that the code solves. Great article!"

Bronze Award Winner

Gaurav Khanna

Editable Button in WPF

AN: "Nice code dump. Would like a little more explanation."
Ed Price: "It's a good solution, but it would be better to break up the code with explanations and to describe the various concepts more."

Only three entries and all three are winners for July. WPF is a popular technology, so hopefully we will see more entrants soon.

And here's an excerpt from the article:

Defining a GroupStyle

To define the appearance of each group of countries, i.e. a continent, you specify a GroupStyle and add it to the GroupStyle property of the ItemsControl. This property contains a collection of GroupStyle objects that determine the group style for each level of groups (to support cases where you may have multiple levels of grouping) with the entry at index 0 describing the top-level group, the entry at index 1 describing the next level and so on.

The GroupStyle class has a ContainerStyle property of type System.Windows.Style that is used to determine the style for each group item in the same level. You can completely redefine the look and feel of a group item by specifying a style that sets the Template property to a custom ControlTemplate. In the sample markup below, an Expander control with a three-state CheckBox control and a TextBlock for displaying the name of the group in its header are used. The ItemsPresenter element is used within a template to specify where the ItemsPanel with the bound objects, i.e. the Country objects in this case, defined by the ItemsControl is to be added in the control’s visual tree.

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource countries}}" ... >

...

<ItemsControl.GroupStyle>

<GroupStyle>

<GroupStyle.ContainerStyle>

<Style TargetType="{x:Type GroupItem}">

<Setter Property="Template">

<Setter.Value>

<ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type GroupItem}">

<Expander>

<Expander.Header>

<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">

<CheckBox IsThreeState="True" />

<TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"

FontWeight="Bold"

Margin="2 0 0 0" />

</StackPanel>

</Expander.Header>

<Expander.Content>

<ItemsPresenter />

</Expander.Content>

</Expander>

</ControlTemplate>

</Setter.Value>

</Setter>

</Style>

</GroupStyle.ContainerStyle>

</GroupStyle>

</ItemsControl.GroupStyle>

</ItemsControl>

Note that the style will be applied to elements of type System.Windows.Controls.GroupItem and the DataContext of each of these group elements is a MS.Internal.Data.CollectionViewGroupInternal object which you can see if you use the WPF Visualizer – a tool that lets you search and drill down the visual tree produced by WPF – when debugging the application in Visual Studio:

===================================

Read the rest here:

WPF/MVVM: Binding the IsChecked Property of a CheckBox to Several Other CheckBoxes

Thanks to Magnus (MM8) for your great contribution to the TechNet Guru contest! You can read about all the July winners here: TechNet Guru Awards - July 2013

Also, for the August Guru competition, see TechNet Guru Contributions - August 2013.

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- User Ed