WPF Login Form Creation - A TimCo Retail Manager Video 

Wow, so far I am about a year behind on these video - but jeez the learning curve on them....I think it is really special to actually watch a professional developer - develop an app at a professional level. Not some knocked together 2 minute youtube video but a complete work through of an actual app - including problem solving in this episode. You sir are an extremely generous person and thank you for that.....on to the next one!

Really appreciate the way you stuck with your code and took your time to debug. Others would have paused and corrected it without or with little reference. Big ups man!

Tom, I love the way you explain things,the way of solving a problem and simplified the codes Thank you very much for every effort you do

I am happy to see someone skilled and experienced stucking at minor issues because earlier i use to feel low if i face such issues but from now it wont effect me. Thanks alot Tim for such a great content. Learning alot from your tutorials.

This is one of my favourite videos in this channel so far, Tim showing the code doesn't work and he doesn't know the answer and slowly debugging, googling, stackoverflow... this is my everyday life and I'm glad I'm not alone hahaha... I don't have enough money yet to be a patron but to help you I don't skip your ads and like all your videos, it's not much but that's whay I can do for now. Love your videos Tim, keep it up.

Tim, thanks for another great video. I am so very glad you kept in the bit about the password glitch. I too have spent those frustrating hours you mention going back and forth between Stack Overflow and my code. It is very reassuring to know that someone as smart and experienced as you has these same issues from time to time. It is not just me! This kind of real life experience of a coder is one of the things that makes your videos so special. Keep it up. Harry Roper

I just love how you always stress that debugging is important, understanding what's under the hood is important. That's what makes difference between developer and GREAT developer! I'd also like to suggest to all devs not only get information from stackoverflow, but answer people's questions too! As i saw in the video, you do it, Tim, that's great! Thank you for what you're doing to help the community!

Fixed errors in names and everything works! I love this quest! Thanks a lot for the course!

"I am not against asking your questions on stackoverflow/google, but I am against doing it first. You should ask it only if you've already spent at least hours trying and testing things you might figure" Great words Wise Timothy!

Thank you Tim, Amazing Video Im currently doing a project on WPF and was having difficulty with the Login Page. You Help alot and I Hope you keep going with RU-vid videos and guide other young developers with your professional experience.

I know I’m a little late to the game here, but I just wanted to share my appreciation for you leaving in that bit of debugging. I’m just just about to start applying for jobs after ~18 years of hobbyist programming, and just finishing up my BS in Software Development, and this video series has definitely given me a boost of confidence as you definitely seem like a great developer, and I find that a lot of the ways you go about planning, coding, and debugging is very similar to the ways I tackle things. Great channel!

Thanks Tim, great video. I learned a lot about debugging which is a topic I do struggle with at times. For anyone who needs it here is the link to the stack overflow page stackoverflow.com/questions/30631522/caliburn-micro-support-for-passwordbox

Hi Tim, it is again a great tutorial. And I like that you didn't remove debugging process. Thank you

Great debugging wisdom Tim! Thanks another awesome video, I am really liking this series.

Wow, this session was so much fun..... Thank you Tim...

Definitely Caliburn turned out to be great! Excellent buddy!

nice video, really good for people starting with WPF. I had the same problem trying to get on the WPF boat 2 years ago coming from a long time of winforms development, and it was really difficult figuring out bindings and xaml errors and DI so i stopped. Your video series rekindled my interest in wpf, always on the watch for new videos every monday :)

Thank you Tim for this course... it's great!

Hi Tim, great Video especially the debugging session it was good experience for me as I have came cross the same problem and now thanks to you I sort this password problem out, one thing I would highly recommend is that you use the MaterialDesign package with only few lines of code you get an awesome user interface

Thank you Tim. Grate video as always.

Thanks for the nice video. Waiting for the next video.

For anyone struggling with the LogIn button not doing anything. I changed the button name from x:Name="LogInButton" to x:Name="LogIn" and it worked.

Thank you Tim. Interesting.

Thank you very much Tom you are a wonderful

I found the same answer on s.o. After I couldn't solve the same problem myself I found this video. =)) Thx!

Great videos it helped me a lot thanks

Hi Tim, I really appreciate these start to finish courses, I'm learning new things every video as a hobbyist developer. This lesson however has left me scratching my head, especially when it comes to the implementation of Caliburn Micro. In all of my previous experiences using MVVM with WPF, I've created my ModelViews to expose my Properties (with INotifyPropertyChanged notifications) to my Views, and then I have used binding to bind those properties within my views. This has always allowed my ModelView to really not care about my Views (separation of model and view states). However, this tutorial felt like the way Caliburn seems to be implemented, there's a lot of coupling in the bootstrapper and magic strings (behind the scenes) that needs to take place. I didn't see any binding, but I am assuming this is happening auto-magically through fairly strict naming of your properties and controls was somehow auto-magically binding them? Does this come with any downsides in terms of performance? Like how did the Log In button even know to reference the CanLogIn property? Is this something where Caliburn requires that property to be predicated by Can and a matching Property Name (LogIn)? For example in the past I would create a property bool IsValue and I would bind that to Enabled on the button itself or through a DelegateCommand. Sorry if this is really long winded, this lesson just completely had me confused based on prior ways of doing this.

One of the best serie i could find, a real problems and how to solve them Live, you make this world a better one. Thank you sir for all your hard work. public bool CanLogIn { get { return !String.IsNullOrEmpty(UserName) && !String.IsNullOrEmpty(Password); } } Would realy like seen a MVP project implemented using caliburn.micro if it can be (i'm kinda confused betwin MVVM and MVP seems to me the same deal).

I found out that resharper supports the auto generation of public properties from a field using the NotifyOfPropertyChange(() => PropName), so it supports caliburn micro out of the box. Very neat.

I am using Caliburn.Micro nuget package v4.0.136 and it seem like they replaced the ActivateItem() method with a property called ActiveItem, so in my ShellViewModel constructor I had to set the ActiveItem property to the loginVM private property. The login screen is the first form that gets launched and the rest of the code seems to be working as expected. Thanks for doing this series, Tim. It's great!

I HIGHLY recommend Stylet MVVM over Caliburn - it’s inspired by Caliburn, but much simpler to grasp / use, and I didn’t have these issues wiring up the password screens I’ve created for my applications.

Tim, I am retired and never employed as a programmer but have been around software since I was 16 and written some simple apps in VB.NET under Windows Forms. I am learning a tremendous amount of info from walking through your Timco Retail video series, (I never walked through WPF for example) but there are a couple of challenges (for me anyway....) that I may need guidance on. 1) My version of VS 2019 Community is more recent than when this video was created so for example getting rid of the tools on a XAML form through the General Settings under debugging is no longer in the same location as shown in the video, no biggie. I tried digging around but cannot find where the setting was moved, just a minor challenge. However, 2) When I installed VS, since it was targeting the .NET framework, the version of C# is set at 7.3 and Microsoft does NOT recommend upgrading it to 8 or higher for targeting the .NET framework. Why do I bring this up? In your PasswordBoxHelper class, where you moved over code from Stack Overflow, there are many areas where public static or private static declarations were in the method statements and the code will not compile - in each instance of a declaration, it simply says in so many words, upgrade to 8.0 C# as it is not supported in 7.3. What might you recommend at this point?

I'm loving this series so far. Even as a veteran developer, it's interesting to watch (or mostly listen to as I'm working). I know this video is over a year old but I do have a couple of comments. You've stated in the past that "!isAlive" could be considered less readable than "isAlive == false" (by a human). But you've used "UserName?.Length > 0" in your validation code. One could argue that "UserName?Length = 0" is not so readable by a human. Perhaps using "string.IsNullorEmpty(UserName)" would be better? This is definitely readable and explains exactly what it is doing. The method is asking "is this string null or empty?" and returns true or false. So your validation would be if (string.IsNullorEmpty(UserName) == false && string.IsNullOrEmpty(Password) == false) { ... }" Wouldn't that be more readable code than using UserName?.Length and Password?.Length? Also, the use of "?" is relatively new. If someone were to download your source code and open it in VS2015, it wouldn't compile because that compiler version doesn't recognize this syntax. (Yes, I know VS2015 is relatively old but perhaps that is all that is available to that developer). Thoughts?

Hi Tim, thank you for your effort in your videos. The binding of Password doesn't work even if i have done your same operations. This in net 6. Have you got any idea to solve? Thanks in advance.

good thanks

It was interesting to watch you fix the Caliburn passwordbox issue with the Login button but I wasn't a big fan of bringing in the Helper class and making additional changes to get it to work. IMO, it just seems to me if you have to jump through so many hoops then you were better off wiring up the button manually without relying on Caliburn, and that would have also resulted in less code and better readability.

Hi Tim, thanks for the awesome series! Tim, I have followed through every video and have a working project so far, except for this specific video, where the login button is not behaving like yours ( not greyed out upon starting the app). Tried using breakpoints to find the problem and realized the password is coming through.

Absolutely brilliant, thanks! I think "!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(UserName)" would probably even be a better check than "Username?." for form input like username :D

This leson is more about debbuging and this is great. Please continue teach in this style. By the way, how did parameters pass in LogIn method?

thanks

Roller coaster of a video :D A suggestion: If you reference some article/blog, kindly put the link in the video description. It is really a shame that the example that is given on the main page of Caliburn Micro site doesn't work by default. Also, a couple of questions: 1. NotifyOfPropertyChange(UserName) vs NotifyOfPropertyChange(() => UserName). What is the difference? 2. I suppose the Can() and the () method mimic the functionality of the CanExecute and Executed dependency Property, is it?

Hi Tim, First of All Thanks for your videos!! they were a great help to me. Is there any way to add a placeholder to the textbox / passwordbox?

Great video, though for now I think I'll stick to winforms, though WPF looks good. I'm finding it difficult to get my head around what calls what and how does it know what parameters to pass in, e.g. The LogIn(u,p) function you had I still don't understand how it knows to pass in the username & password, or how it knows to enable/disable the button - guess it's all to do with Caliburn. Though it was interesting to see. As for stackoverflow code - one thing I would like to stress is when you copy/paste code - Look at it, analyse it, and check it. Learn to understand what it's doing, and why. Glad you kept the debugging session in though. :) Thanks!

userName/ password started with upper case, while they are lower case in viewmodel

Thanks for such a significant content. Why not to use datatriggers for login button enabling instead of that whole staff in viewmodel?

1:01:59 The "CanLogIn" can be simplified to: public bool CanLogIn => UserName?.Length > 0 && Password?.Length > 0; Which in my opinion makes for a much more readable and simple to use code :) Thank you for all your hard work! I am really enjoying your videos!

In Absence of Bootstrapper in MvvmCross, is it still possible to recreate this shell view and subsequent Mode-within-a-model? I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the changes and the closest I see is App.cs in the Core project of my MvvM solution. I really like the shell concept so just trying to recreate it with the shiny new toys

Tim, I am new to your videos and your Patreon. It is great to be here. Thanks for your excellent videos. In this video you had a null object issue that you solved by adding a "?" to the end of the "UserName" and "Password" variables. It was my understanding that this simply made a "non-nullable" variable, nullable. If this is a null check instead, can you give us more info or a reference on how it works? I have been searching for an answer and I have come up short of getting one.

Great Video! A question I would have is, how does the Login button KNOW that after CanLogIn returns true, it can be pressed? I cannot see any direct connection between these two behaviors? CanLogIn also doesn't seem to be some Overriden method or property of Caliburn Micro that has some kind of wire up behind the scenes. Thanks!

Around 40:00 I didnt want to add the helper it looked to messy - I change the PasswordBox back into a standard text box and the original example works fine - so I am guessing its the Caliburn system that doesnt like PasswordBox - there must be a setting somewhere to include that type - I will update if I figure it out

Regarding the password box problem, the actual problem is that the Password property of PasswordBox control is not a dependency property; it's just a CLR property. That's the reason, it is not bound to the Password property of the viewmodel. The solution is to create an attached property which can be bound to the viewmodel's Password property and then use this attached property in the PasswordBox control. Through the attached property, we need to interact with the Password property of the Password Box control. This is illustrated here - www.codemag.com/article/1405061/XAML-Magic--Attached-Properties.

Hi @Tim, I am unable to understand the concept of "CanLogIn" . How it is bound to "Login" method? If I change "CanLogin" method name to something else like "Can_Login", "Login" button is not disabled. Can you please put light on it? Thanks in advance.

I'm having a problem at 30:00. When I run the application, the ShellView window appears with the dockpanel menu items as it should, but LoginView isn't there. I triple checked every line we've written (it's indeed "

Jay new video :D

Great tutorial Tim I think, Interface(ILoginViewModel) would have been better in LoginViewModel constructor

I was just visiting my old friend Tim while searching for ADFS Login Logic. Although it was not exactly what I was looking for I am glad that I kept the video running ... When I heard that he started to have the Error I got invested. I still wonder what was going wrong... Maybe it´s the way how Passwordboxes are delivered in System

Do you know Tim instead of changing background color 13:28, you can just set design background to white with one of tiny icons between xaml and view. No need to thanks :-)

Hey Tim, why is there a need to use reflection? ( I just know that it helps with late binding, I mean if you don't have knowledge of classes on compile time, Reflection helps)

Hello Tim, Thanks for the Video. Why are most Desktop Applications that use OAuth2 opening a Browser to Login and than redirect back to the App instead of a Login form like we did now?

Hi First of all, thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience !! I have a question about Caliburn Micro since it is no longer supported - as for your experience, is this relevant in the industry?

First, thank you for these videos they are great. I have a question. Im getting a syntax error 'name does not exsist in the current context'. When using NotifyOfPropertyChange, Ive tried updating, restarting, deleting the project and restarting from scratch. I feel like im missing something obvious.

What version of VS and Git are you using in your videos? I have VS 2019 community. The Git/Team Explorer are way different (and in my opinion much harder to follow/use). Can you point me to somewhere so I can learn the whole Git interactions you show and what has to be done with what is obviously newer versions (what I would call the "master/main" changes?

Hi I don't understand how it's possible the button is disabled? It 's bind to x:Name="Login" (same as Model function) but the property is called "CanLogIn" which is bind to nothing. How does this work?

Thanks for the video Tim, really nicely produced. Is Caliburn widely used in .Net shops? What was the reason for you to choose Caliburn API (sorry, if I have missed if you already explained in previous video)?

Just spent 30mins trying to guess what I did wrong because the login view was not displayed. Read through Caliburn micro documentation on DI, tried to break it, fix... and just when I was getting close to rethinking my choices for the pat 7 years, and probably changing career, I realized that I typed Activeitem instead of ActiveItem in the shell view xaml. How can I debug such errors? It's more like typos but it can be really annoying. Another great video by Tim. I really like his approach and the way he explains. Tim, will you consider teaching a group of several people on-line, in some sort of interactive class with 10-15 people? Paid course, of course. Just a suggestion. I know you are a busy man, and I really appreciate that you give a portion of your time to create this videos. Thank you!

I love you

Hello Tim I have a quick question. I'm trying to implement something similar to a UWP NavigationView in my app so I was thinking of putting the hamburger menu on my ShellView, but then I realized that it would be visible during the Log In Page which doesn't really make sense. Would you recommend having a Grandparent->Parent->Child situation where after I log in I load the "NavigationView" page that has an additional view in it?

Hi, Tim, Thanks again for this excellent video. I have maybe a stupid question: how the "LogIn" button "enable" property was linked with CanLogIn property? I could not find it either in the ShellViewModel.cs file, nor the ShellView.xaml file. thanks and regards

Hi Tim, Thank you for the great video. I know it's has been a while, but if you still read the comments maybe you could explain why do we use NotifyOfPropertyChange(() => Password), I'm mean notification of the property change that calls the same property. I understand if on the Password property change we call CanLogIn property that makes sense. I did my research and CaliburnMicro page shows the same example, but I also commented out lines in question and it still works. I don't like the idea of having code that actually doesn't do anything. Thanks a lot.

Hi Tim, Thanks for the nice work. A quick question, Is it too late to pay for and start the weekly challenge ?? I think such challenge would improve my skills

Hi Tim, I was wondering if you can help me. At 57:45, you got values into your 'username' and 'password' variables but when I debug my code neither 'username' nor 'password' has values inside even when I check "NotifyOfPropertyChange()" it doesn't return any values. SOLVED: .xaml values were changed from 'userName' -> 'UserName' and 'password' -> 'Password' ... that's so mean.

Hello and thank you for your course. When I add the LoginViewModel param to the ShellViewModel constructor I get a CS0051 error (Inconsistent accessibility: param type 'type' is less accessible than method 'method'. I may have missed something. I reviewed my code and compared to yours so far with no luck. Any idea of what I may have missed.

for those wondering at 30:01 if you are not seeing the form for logging in make sure you are using an older version of caliburn before v 4. also make sure your classes are public. if you have newer version of caliburn than him your activateitem will be async and nothing will work.

Hi Tim, I'm having red squigllies under ''BoundPasswordProperty throughout the code from you had copied from Stack Overflow. I have looked through the code for a possible casing issue but even after taking several breaks, I'm still missing this tree from the forest. Although some of this seems a wee 'bit of magic, I'm figuring its from a property called Password? any clues as to where I look for mysterious termite?

Hi Tim, eventually, why initializing _password = "" prevents Password property to be updated? Thank you for all your outstanding quality tutorials!

Hello Tim and anyone else who can help. I have a few quick questions. At the 38:40 min mark you have a lowercase userName parameter in the CanLogIn() method and then check its Length in an if statement inside of the method itself. How does it know to match the lowercase userName parameter to the uppercase UserName property. Is it just because they're spelled the same, and if so is that something that's coming from Caliburn.micro or is that just a regular c# thing I didn't know about? Also does the UserName property automatically link up with the UserName textbox due to spelling and also casing? Finally we implement the Screen interface, is this what allows NotifyOfPropertyChange? Thanks in advance for any response

Hi. At 29:57 when I hit Start to see if it works, visual studio tells me that ShellViewModel doesn't have a default parameterless constructor. Why's that happening and what should I do? Thank you!

Hi Tim Whats your suggestion to learn the language? Do I pause and read about things like DockPanel and Menu(I don't know what they do) or just keep going, get through all the videos and come back to them?

Hi Tim, Your course is so good. I'm following it but I got a problem. My login usercontrol is not showing in ShellView and I'm not getting any error as well? any other way I can use login form?

Hi Tim. Any reason why you don't use the Toggle artboard button on the preview toolbar (3rd button from white) instead of setting white background colour? The nice thing about this is it applies to all previews, so you don't need to change code as you do with white background. It's something i've noticed in all your WPF videos. :)

Hey Tim. In my application, i have the contentcontrol fill the entire ShellView, and i made it successfully load in the LoginView like your example. How would i go about navigating to a SignUpView with a button that is on the LoginView? I want to avoid the menu as it wouldn't make sense in my application.

I have problem with 'using Caliburn.Micro;' it said 'The type or namespace name 'Caliburn' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)'

I have seen every video and you're really good at explaining. I will probably do exactly as you do but.. In the end after you troubleshooted and found out you could use the ? in userName?.Length > 0 && password?.Length > 0 i tried to take the ? away and instead of using the > 0 i changed to this code: if (UserName.Length != 0 && Password.Length != 0) When debugging and testing it out it work the same way.. Would writing != instead of using the Username?.Length be any different and cause problems later in code?

I followed along with the code but could not see where the Login Button is set to disabled. My code was identical (as far as I could see) to yours but my button was always enabled. When I pasted your code over mine it worked. Mystery. Great series by the way.

I did it slightly differently. Instead of checking the length and if the property is null you can use the string.IsNullOrEmpty() method. public bool CanLogIn => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Username) && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Password);

Interesting video. In the long run playing around was very helpful. I am however confused by the following two questions: 1. Despite going through the Caliburn and Micro documentation, I couldn't figure out who or where the methods CanLogIn and LogIn were invoked. I had assumed they were part of an interface within Caliburn and Micro, but the code was able to build correctly even if I removed the implementation for those two methods which shouldn't happen if these methods were part of an interface. Are these two methods invoked by Caliburn and Micro and if so why does my code build without implementing these two methods? 2. Since the UserName property didn't have the problem that the Password property had and it was was able to invoke the method CanLogIn, why did we need to add the line: NotifyOfPropertyChange(() => CanLogIn) in the UserName property? Thanks

Hi Tim, first your videos are great and awesome. I'm following this project of yours and I have question, I follow this video all through out but every time I run my application my "LogIn" button seems to be enabled in default. What seems to be problem?. Sorry for my question, I don't have enough knowledge in WPF. Thank you.

Should big Enterprise Applications use MVVM Frameworks like Caliburn or MVVMLight or rather implement MVVM themselves? At my workplace its all without frameworks, its alot more work but is it the way to go?

why in ViewModelShell in ctor you put LoginViewModel instead insterface like ILoginViewModel ? It should be interface for better testability instead that concrete class.

Hello, Tim I have been going through your online courses. They are good, I have been VB.net programmer and i want to understand C# better and how to use WPF and MVVM. I read through the stackoverflow post and the first person, made the CanLogIn a property and did NotifyOfPropertyChanged. I changed your code just little instead of using Username?.Length > 0, I just used !string.IsNullorEmpty(UserName) and same for Password, which thinking now, i could just did as one return line. Does that do give the same results you were trying get if use !string.IsNullorEmpty or something completely different?

How would you open up that LoginView from the ShellViewModel in a separate window?

Can you add a video to explain what is the best way to encrypt app.config file to hide the connection strings?

Hi Tim, thanks for the awesome series! Tim iv followed through every video and have a working proj so far, except for this specific video, where I have fixed the password issue to now have a value, but in debug mode i can see that my UserName field is never read and is never NULL then so my login button fails. my break-point on NotifyOfPropertyChange-Username never catches a user name change on its break-point proving no value is being read from the UserName Field... The Password one works fine and looking at the code, both the UserName and The Password is practically identical in structure. What can cause the Username field not to notify on change(and also not change from Null to its field value) while the Password field is read and works? I think the Username field stopped being read when I introduced that StackOverflow code for the PwdBoxhelper and the bootstrapper - although that does still make password work, except i cant proceed now since username && password check fails since one remains empty/null? Any ideas? i can send u my LoginViewModel.cs file if you want, maybe u can spot an obvious mistake? - thanks again for the great series, when im a little richer than "Flat Broke", ill be sure to send you some treasure - YOU ROCK!

After doing a lot of web development the margin/padding confuses me. CSS applies it Top, Right, Bottom, Left. But here it's Left, Top, Right, Bottom.

hi tim i want to ask you a question can we use mvvm with material design and is there any problems ??

Hey Tim: I see that we have some pretty complex stuff going on in Caliburn Micro, and that's great. But again I pose the question (as I would with any useful tool - Swagger, Caliburn Micro, PostMan, etc...) , as I am trying to learn app development and get a job that does NOT use these tools, and many will not, is there a way to understand the connections that NEED to be made, if Caliburn Micro (to use an example) was not implemented? As a software developer, I GET that I need to figure things out and have a good structural knowledge of how things work, but Caliburn Micro (again as an example) has some pretty complex behind-the-scenes code going on. If it wasn't implemented wherever I end up working, what would I need to understand (and where would I see it in the VS solution/project(s) - being implemented)? Does that all make sense? I can clarify if need be!

Hey Tim: I've tried to figure out how to get the grid lines out of the grid AND the forms. I went to TOOLS:OPTIONS - and set show grid to false, but that does not seem to work. How can I get my form to look like yours. I have the white background, but again, the actual form and grid has the lines. I'm using VS 2019, and that's how it looked when I created the View(s). I didn't see you go to any properties to remove grid lines, so I assume it's already the default for you (in an earlier version)? Any ideas?

Dear Tim My name is Mahfoud and I am from Algeria. I cannot find enough words to express my gratitude and thanks to you. Also, please accept my apology, because I do not have the money to be a member of patreon. I do not even have a credit card, but make sure that this debt is on me and I will repay it. In my project, I want to go with the ribbon and taskbar (multiple tab like visual studio) I would be grateful if you could make a video about that or guide me to the right place. Sorry for my English.

I have everything working as expected, but I cannot figure out the three things below. Basically, I just can't see the connection between the button (x:Name="Login" in LoginView) and the code in LoginViewModel LogIn(). The casing doesn't line up, there is no click event -- I am confused on this one. I watched the video once to see what was going on and then a second time to code along with you. Maybe I missed that explanation. 1.) Why is the Login button disabled to begin with? 2.) How it becomes enabled? 3.) When I click on it, how does it fire the LogIn() method in LoginViewModel.cs?

Tip: When duplicating lines, you can do "Ctrl+D" it will duplicate the line, instead of doing "Ctrl+C" + "Ctrl+V".