Today I needed to make use of the WPF Toolkit from Codeplex in a .Net 4.0 WPF application. Those who have used the WPF Toolkit will know that it was built for .Net 3.5 WPF, and a number of features within the toolkit got folded into the .Net 4.0 WPF framework (most notably a DataGrid control and the VisualStateManager).
Unfortunately the fact that these features got folded into WPF itself means that there a number of naming clashes between the toolkit and WPF 4. This has been reported on the forums a few times and there is also a thread in which someone from MS China states “the WPF Toolkit will not be updated to 4.0 anytime soon”.
I really needed to use the charting controls from the toolkit and I didn’t want to deal with naming conflicts, so I forked the WPF Toolkit from Codeplex into a Bitbucket repo, upgraded it to .Net 4.0 and VS 2010 and removed all the bits which conflict with WPF 4. The following have been removed:
- VisualStateManager
- DataGrid
- Calendar
- DatePicker
I have also dropped out the Visual Studio design-time support. You can grab the code or the compiled assemblies from Bitbucket.
Enjoy!