Comments on: The Missing .NET #7: Displaying Enums in WPF

By: Steve C

Steve C — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 03:40:26 +0000

Linus, read AC374′s note. You have to swap a bit of code to make it work.

By: Soarez

Soarez — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:11:46 +0000

Creating objects with the activator is very costly, I don’t see why do you have to use reflection to create generic dictionaries where simple non-generic hashtables would suffice. Caching the result of DisplayNames property might also speed it up.

By: Linus

Linus — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:50:26 +0000

Hi, I have got an error in the DisplayNames property on line:
displayValues.Add(enumValue, displayString);

it says the enumValues is not of type “System.String” and cannot be used in this generic collection.

By: Nahuel

Nahuel — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 15:55:37 +0000

Excellent article! Its what I was looking for, And I was not expecting to laugh when reading it, but that is what happend. You should write a book, i would buy it because im sure it wont be boreing.
(Sory for my english, im from Argentina)

By: Steve C

Steve C — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:23:35 +0000

That’s enough to make me use a table instead of an enum.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:06:54 +0000

unfortunatelly this solution is absurdally slow, for even just 100 enum-fueled comboboxes in list. So for me its useless.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:17:41 +0000

Fantastic writeup, thank you for sharing this! It has definitely helped me out.

By the way, shouldn’t no spaces make you 32.33 (repeating, of course)% more efficient?

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:56:24 +0000

Very nice write-up. I learned a lot. Thanks.
I had one issue when implementing this. The new XAML GUI dev environments (Blend and the VS designer) choke on the EnumDisplayer class. It looks like they’re trying to be too smart for their own good and how you define displayValues confuses them. They throw a null reference exception when they try to inspect the Convert method.

Adding the below to the Convert method fixes it:
if (displayValues == null) return null;

This instantiation of objects within XAML is all very confusing. Can you recommend a source of a good explanation on how this works?

By: Klaus

Klaus — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:08:33 +0000

Excellent stuff. Thank you.

By: WolfMoon

WolfMoon — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:38:10 +0000

Both thumbs up for this solution. That’s exactly what I was looking for. It’s smart, simple and very flexible – true programming gem!