WPF and the modal dialog (boring)

Warning boring tech related blog entry follows:

Holy cows! WPF has made it VERY difficult to create a modal dialog box. It's difficult, because to do it properly, your modal dialog has to have a pointer to it's parent window. You can skip this step, have have one of those really junky applications that hide away your modal dialog in a land far far away.

The trick (hack) is the following

1) You need a System.IntPtr containing a pointer to the windows handle (this.Handle if you are lucky enough to be in a System.Windows.Window.Form)

2) You need to feed this pointer into your dialog thusly:

WindowInteropHelper wih = new WindowInteropHelper(myUserControl);
wuh.Owner = myIntPtr;
// then, with magical flair:
myUserControl.ShowDialog();

log4net

I keep forgetting how to switch on log4net (using app.config)

I always end up wasting time on the apache docs, and searching the net to find this

Step 0:

Ensure that the first declaration of

"private static readonly log4net.ILog Log =log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);"

Occurs in your main assembly - if the first declaration is in linked assemblies, it won't load the setting correctly.

Step 1: Edit AssemblyInfo.cs
[assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(Watch = true)]

Step 2: Edit App.config

Important! The configSections bit has to be at the top of your config file. So if you've got an existing one, don't just add it on to the end!

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<configSections>
<section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net" />
</configSections>
<log4net>
<appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender" >
<layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
<conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger [%ndc] - %message%newline" />
</layout>
</appender>
<root>
<level value="INFO" />
<appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender" />
</root>
</log4net>
</configuration>

Step 3:

Need more example files - go to http://logging.apache.org/log4net/release/config-examples.html