C# as opposed to XAML

asim mittal

Hi,

I've been playing around with WPF lately, and its nice to use XAML. But XAML is helpful only when the layout is not yet done. It is, after all a markup language. What i want to achieve is loading an image when the window loads, creating a white border around that image, and showing the two on the main window.

I followed the tree structure that XAML uses, but somehow everytime i debug, nothing is visible on the form... why is this happening?

namespace Images_and_Borders
{
    /// 
    /// Interaction logic for MainWindow.xaml
    /// 

    public partial class MainWindow : Window
    {
        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            Grid grid = new Grid();
            Image image = new Image();
            BitmapImage bitmap = new BitmapImage(new Uri("d:\\image.jpg"));
            Border imageBorder = new Border();
            double aspectRatio = 0;

            image.Source = bitmap;
            aspectRatio = image.Width / image.Height;
            imageBorder.Height = 200;
            imageBorder.Width = imageBorder.Height * aspectRatio;

            imageBorder.Child = image;
            grid.Children.Add(imageBorder);
        }

        
    }
}

As you can see i create a Grid, then an image, then a border and basically recreate the tree as it would have been done in XML image ==child of ==> border == child of ==> grid

But when i run this, i get a blank window. I don't want to forcibly put controls on my window. Later on I'd like to make my own custom image class which would essentially contain a border and an image. Any clues about why i'm not able to see it?

I'm obviously doing something wrong.

Thanks,
Mittal

2 Replies

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asim mittal16y ago
Well here's what solved my problem:

Instead of adding the grid in the constructor as shown above, i added it on the Form's UI using XAML. Then on form_load i created the image and the border and added them to the grid. Having said that, it seems rather weird why the previous approach didn't work.

What if I wanted to add controls to a window on the fly (at runtime), and I didn't have a grid or a stackpanel on the window. I had even written a little more code to explicitly set the visibility properties of all the elements (from the code above) to Visible, but that didn't work either.

But is this regular behavior??
Sam Hobbs16y ago
It's clear to you what you see but it is no clear to me. Do you get the border? What about the Grid? Are you sure that the Visible property is true for all relevant controls?