When I last visited the TabControl project, I changed it so that the look of the Tab content was done via VB. One thing that has been niggling at me since was how the first Tab content was done.
The content on the Tab was still entered on the XAML code and the spans were defined there as well so the look could was not really created purely with VB. Since I was after creating the look with VB, the first Tab also be included with this rather than a mixture of XAML and VB.
I did find that getting the same visual look took a lot more lines of code but, if you were to use the same process on a TextBlock, adding more text in various styles during run time could be done.
The beginning XAML for the Tab is now very basic with just a Grid on it.
On the code behind starts with declaring variables for both a TextBlock and a Span.
The textblock is going to be placed inside the grid on the tab and the span is going to end up being the content of the textblock.
Using a span for this is really great. A span is used for grouping a set of different inline content together. Thus allowing several different look to be incorporated in the same span and the really great thing about spans is that they are not inherited so each inline element you add to a span can have its own totally separate look. You don’t need to get rid of the formatting of the previous element before applying a new formatting.
The first line I add to the span is going to be in plain text. The text is added by passing the text I want as a Parameter of the Run Class. The run class is an inline content element that may contain either formatter or unformatted text. So basically it is a container for the text I want to add to the span.
The run is passed into the Add method of the Inlines property. The inlines property is actually a collection of inline elements which make up the span.
From this plain text beginning it is just a matter of declaring a new span for the style that is wanted to be added next, defining the style and adding that span to the inlines collection of the root span.
One the span is formatted as is wanted, the textblock is added to the grid on the tab and the Span is applied to the inlines property of the textblock.
Initially I thought that the property of the textblock to apply the span to would have been the text property, but after a little digging I found that because a span is an inline property, it needed to be included in the inline collection of the control.
Running the App shows that all the formatting that is set with the code behind is working perfectly.
Thus giving a more pure VB setup of the tab contents.