Tag Archives: XAML

Introducing SortingObservableCollection

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ObservableCollections are awesome. The two way binding lets your user seamlessly update your model and any programmatic changes to the model will be seamlessly reflected in the view.

I wanted one that kept it’s items in order, no matter what. It should maintain order as items are added and watch them via INotifyPropertyChanged to move them automatically. So here it is on CodePlex and NuGet. Sample usage is:

var collection = new SortingObservableCollection<MyViewModel, int>(Comparer<int>.Default, model => model.IntPropertyToSortOn);

collection.Add(new MyViewModel(3));
collection.Add(new MyViewModel(1));
collection.Add(new MyViewModel(2));

// At this point, the order is 1, 2, 3

collection[0].IntPropertyToSortOn = 4;
// As long as IntPropertyToSortOn uses INotifyPropertyChanged, this will cause the collection to resort correctly

XAML ListView that Stacks Items from the Bottom (for Messaging)

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If you’re building a chat application UI using XAML and targeting a device with a touchscreen, there’s an issue you’ll likely run into; if the software keyboard is up, it scrolls some of your messages out of view. If there’s only 1 or 2 messages in the whole conversation, you’ll end up with them getting scrolled out of view by default.

normal

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So how can we fix this? Searching didn’t really give me an answer. In Android, all you have to do is set the “stackFromBottom” attribute to true. The answer in XAML is to put the ListView in a Grid’s Row with the Height=”*” and the ListView’s VerticalAlignment attribute to “Bottom”.

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