One of the things that first caught me out in WPF was the simple topic of colors. For example, let's say you want to reset the BackColor of a Form in Windows Forms.
Easy enough. This will do the job:
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Me.BackColor = Color.CadetBlue
When it comes to WPF, you'll know that we are dealing with a Window, instead of a Form and have probably already picked up that BackColor is now Background. You can however, still use "Me" to reference the Window.
But if you were to try something like:
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Me.Background = Color.CadetBlue
' or even
Me.Background = Colors.CadetBlue
you would be disappointed.
You would however get some help from Intellisense (at least with the second version). The error message tells you that a Color cannot be converted to a Brush. And there's the answer to the problem.
The Background property doesn't take a Color - it takes a Brush, which of course can, and usually does, have a color assigned to it. Don't forget though that you are not limited to a single solid color; there are many gradient, tile and image based options that you can choose when it comes to brushes in WPF.
So this code will work fine in WPF:
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Me.Background = New SolidColorBrush((Colors.CadetBlue))
Ah yes, I hear you say, but what about the theory that you should use XAML for the look and code-behind for the behaviour? Well, I can't disagree with you there and personally I would use:
<Window x:Class="Window1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"
Background="CadetBlue">
where the Background property for the Window is set there in the XAML. However, there may well be times when you want the user to have a say in color choices and in those cases it can be easier to take the user's input and deal with it in the code-behind.
For example, if the user was empowered to enter values for the ARGB components then you might use an approach like the following:
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Dim col As New System.Windows.Media.Color
' In reality the values below could be
' selected by the user and passed in
col = Color.FromArgb(214, 122, 52, 24)
Dim br As New SolidColorBrush(col)
Me.Background = br
It would also be quite easy to create a display in WPF where you bind, for example, sliders to the Brush that is used for the background. But I won't go any deeper into that just now, as this sub-set of blog items is meant only to help identify those missing WinForms favorites and repatriate them as WPF troops.