Black's Web

Recently working on the UI of a WPF project I struggled attempting to get the Right Click Context Menu to appear as normal, to the right and below the mouse pointer.  No matter what options I used with ContextMenu (.Placement and .PlacementRectangle) the Context Menu would appear to the left and down instead of the right and down.

I spent a few hours researching, testing, debugging, no matter what I couldn’t get the context menu to appear to the right.  I then enlisted the help of some other developers at the .Net Framework Developer Center forums and learned I was making the correct assumptions and doing the right things but it was still not working.  Link to forum thread.

I then noticed that the positioning of the Context Menu was not consistent with all applications on my system.  I am using a Fujitsu Lifebook Tablet PC, running Windows 7.  Most of the apps I use daily, Visual Studio 2010, Chrome, FireFox, AIM to name a few all had context menu normally to the right and down from the mouse pointer.  But Explorer, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer for example all had the context menu to the left and down.

Further research on Google finally revealed that Windows 7 had a registry key that would determine if the context menu appeared to the right or left.  And more importantly Windows 7 had control panel settings specific to a Tablet PC.

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Casting Crowns, on of my top favorite Christian rock bands recently had a contest.  Mark Hall, the lead singer, recently made a new years resolution to stop drinking sweet drinks (soda, sweet tea, etc) in favor of just water or something not sweetened.  He tweeted about this and soon had interest from band members and fans.  He came up with a name for the group making this commitment change named HydroForce.

Encouraged by the interest of fans and such, he started a contest looking for the best HydroForce Tshirt design for HydroForce.  Design elements were to involve: Captain Crown (some action figure looking guy that looks like Mark), HydroForce, water, World Vision and Casting Crowns.  The winner was to win a trip to one of their concerts including backstage meet and greet with the band.

I jumped at this opportunity and proceeded to come up with a bunch of designs with hopes of actually being chosen.  I tried to keep the designs simple, clean, and not too much to read, but do my best to include as many design elements as possible.  This was a fun challenge for me.  Here are my designs.

You can see the other designs here:  http://castingcrowns.com/hydroforce

Unfortunately, none of my designs were chosen by the Casting Crowns decision panel.  Below are the 2 winners (they couldn’t decide on just one).  Interestingly, 1 design only included 2 design elements and the other included 3 of the 5 design elements.  I personally disagree with their choices, (though the on the left does look nice), especially the one on the right (which does not show in the list of designs).

Image above taken from:  http://twitpic.com/3r0aza

But this will not deter me from following Mark or enjoying their music and I look forward to another another fun challenge.

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In August I took the family to Pocono Plateau, a Eastern Pennsylvania Conference United Methodist church camp.  Kim and I were councilors for the week while the kids were campers.  The weather was wonderful and the kids had a great time.  The Plateau is where Kim and I met.

I snapped a bunch of nice “nature” pictures while I was there and compiled the best into this slide show via Windows.Live Photos.  Move your mouse over the bottom of the slide show and click on the Play button.  The slide show uses SilverLight, so you may have to accept and install the SilverLight plugin.  Click HERE for the slide show.

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