Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘NativeBehaviors’

I wrote yesterday about the WPF Snap-To Behavor that I created, and showed you how simple it is, but I skipped over where the magic happens, so I thought I’d go through how I created the Native Behaviors collection class, because there are a few cool tricks in here that I wanted to share with WPF developers at large (even if you’re not interested in hooking the Window Procedure).

The framework for Native Bahaviors is made up of just two classes, the first of which is basically 3 lines of code.

NativeBehaviors is an ObservableCollection of NativeBehaviors, obviously . But it’s ever so much more than that. First of all, it has the NativeBehaviors attached property, but it also has the code for actually hooking a WPF window to get the Window Messages, and a WndProc which processes each message against the mappings retrieved from the various NativeBehaviors that have been registered.

Lets start with the attached dependency property. There’s a very clever (and problematic) trick in the way this property is exposed. If you look at this code, you’ll see I create a private NativeBehavior dependency property, and then create public Get/Set accessors for “Behavior” which just call the NativeBehavior property. The reason for this is that if the dependency property is public, or if the public accessors even have the same name … the XAML parser finds the dependency property and uses it directly (bypassing the get/set accesors), which means you have to have an extra element in your XAML markup to initialize the NativeBehaviors collection, or you get something like this screenshot.

So instead, we hide the dependency property, and supply a getter which is backed by the dependency property. I should not that although this works great in the .Net Framework, it’s not recognized properly by all of the tools (including Resharper 4.1 and even Expression Blend), so you may have to fiddle with things.

There’s a little more to it in the actual class source code, I’m glossing over the simplest parts, and leaving out all the XML documentation comments too. We override the CollectionChanged event so that we can hook new Behaviors as they arrive, and we make sure to hook the WndProc whenever the Target Window is set:

And finally, the last part of the puzzle is my actual WndProc implementation, which has a minor drawback in that we can hypothetically have multiple behaviors which process the same window message … and may each return a different value (which we cannot reconcile). For now I’m just returning the last (non-zero) result (in actuality, all of the behaviors I’ve written thus far return zero).

That pretty much covers the framework. The actual behaviors can be fairly simple like my Snap-To behavior (which is actually too simple), or extremely complex like my latest behavior, which is a port Joe Castro’s custom Window ‘Chrome’ to my behavior framework, and I’m hoping some of you will choose to write new ones and submit them as patches to the CodePlex project (for now, I’m just piggybacking it on the PoshConsole project). But in any case, the latest code is available via subversion on CodePlex, and you can download today’s snapshot here.

There are many desirable behaviors for Windows applications that are just much harder to do than they should be with the tools that Microsoft has provided in the .Net Framework. In WPF, many of these behaviors are even harder to create than in Windows Forms because the necessary hooks take a bit more work to write (thanks to the fact that there’s no window handles, so dropping down to “Native” code is harder. Luckily, WPF Attached Properties give us a whole new way to reuse these behaviors once they’re written.

I’ve started working on a few classes I’m calling NativeBehaviors, because they rely on intercepting the native Window Message processing, and I’ve put together a simple framework to let me write them, which I thought I would share. The first one I wrote is a SnapToBehavior, which implements a feature that people seem to be constantly re-implementing in apps. Basically, it makes a window snap to the screen edge when it gets close (and prevents them from being moved off-screen). I’ve also written a Global HotkeysBehavior which lets you register Hotkeys that work whenever your app is running (even if another app is active) so you can create a Hotkey to hide your app and show it, or whatever.

In the rest of this article I’ll show you how to achieve this in WPF using my base NativeBehavior class, and how to use it on a Window. Since some of you won’t really care how it works, let’s start with:

How to make your WPF Windows snap to screen edges in 3 easy steps:

Step 1. Add a reference to the Huddled.Wpf.Interop library.
Step 2. Add my Xml namespace to your root Window element
Step 3. Paste three lines from below….

I should point out the “SnapDistance” property of the SnapToBehavior is actually a WPF “Thickness” which lets you specify the distance from the screen edge as a single number to use on all sides, or as a separate number for each side: Left, Top, Right, Bottom. And that’s pretty much all there is to know.

How to implement a NativeBehavior.

The implementation of the SnapToBehavior is actually ridiculously simple, given the NativeBehavior framework. I simply created a SnapToBehavior class which derives from NativeBehavior, and implemented the single mandatory method:

When my new behavior is added to the Behaviors collection, my handler will be registered, and whenever the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING message arrives, it will be called. Now I defined a DependencyProperty for the SnapDistance, so that you could set that in XAML. It’s extremely simple, and VisualStudio has a built-in snippet for dependency properties, but here’s the code:

Once I have that, the last piece of the puzzle is to actually handle the window position changing message (think of it as an event, if you’re not used to Win32 message-based programming).

The basics of handling WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING is that you get a structure passed in which has the proposed position of the Window, (including it’s z-index related to other apps) and you can basically tweak that however you like. Obviously there are lots of possibilities for this single message: always-on-bottom windows, undraggable windows, etc., but in our case we’re just concerned about how close we are to the edge.

We use the SystemParameters class to get the VirtualScreenLeft, VirtualScreenTop, and VirtualScreenWidth and VirtualScreenHeight which define the rectangle we’ll use for snapping. In the case of non-rectangular arrangements of multiple monitors this isn’t quite sufficient, but for our example anything more would be a distraction. Then we just check to see if the proposed position is within the “SnapDistance” of any of the edges, and if so, we change the position to be against the edge. That’s really all there is to it.

If you look at the code example below you’ll see I have to “Marshal” the WindowPosition structure in and out of an IntPtr which is passed in the WindowMessage … that’s the downside of intercepting window messages that the framework doesn’t already translate for us, but in this particular case, it’s actually fairly trivial.

Download it, or get the source code

If you’d like, you can download the current Huddled Interop for WPF library right now, or you can check out the source from CodePlex SVN or just download the most recent commit (You are only interested in the “Huddled” project which is in the “trunk”, not the “trunk-3.5”). The source is licensed freely under the BSD or GPL v2 (and a few other licenses, see the top of the source code files).

Either way you’ll get not just the SnapToBehavior but also the global HotkeysBehavior, and the Native Behaviors framework which I’ll write more about later, but for now, in case you want to try to use it, here’s an example using both the SnapTo and HotkeysBehavior (you can find this in the GlobalHotkeys demo project, which includes some sample code for handling hotkey conflicts). Enjoy.