Been feeling like I haven’t had much in the way of valuable posts lately… Mostly just links that I find interesting… Been a victim of having too many cool projects and training gigs lined up…

One thing I like about training ops is it always uconvers some interesting scenarios that “should” be easy but really isn’t.

For example in a training we did earlier this year, there was a request to create a simple tab control that displayed its tab items on the left and right but did so with 90 degree text. Seemed like it should be easy with a layout transform but it actually took a bit of futzing to get it right… In the end it wasnt really hard.

http://www.designerslove.net/samples/VerticalTabItems.xaml

You might notice in the system tab control that there is a TabStripPlacement property that allows you to place the position of the tabpanel to the different sides but the text stays horizontal. If you use TabStripPlacement in simple styles nothing happens because nothing in the triggers was designed. I have extended the Simple Styles (sorta… this is a combo of editing a copy of the standard TabControl template and extending the Simple Styles TabItem.)

Potentially it might have been better to create a single TabItem custom control that has a new custom property called TabDirection… But for now I have two different styles for TabItem… it’s a little bit more cumbersome this way because when you change the look of the tab you have to update it in two places rather than one.