Visible caret when not focused

Hi Leon,

The Caret object has SuspendBlinking() and ResumeBlinking() methods you can call. The SuspendBlinking() call takes a bool indicating whether the caret should display or not. So you could probably pass true to show it and then false later (if the control isn't focused) to hide it again. Or call ResumeBlinking if the control has focus again.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I've tried the SuspendBlinking method, but realised that the caret is not shown when the editor is not focused regardless whether the blinking is suspended or not. Blinking is automatically resumed when the editor gains focus again.

Hi Leon,

Hmmm, you are correct. There appears to be a line in the EditorView code that prevents the caret from showing up if the control doesn't have focus.

It looks like Silverlight's drag/drop functionality is still limited to file drops. Were you intending to use a custom drag/drop manager here? If so, what sort of content were you intending to move? We do plan on adding drag/drop support within the editor itself eventually.

I have several options in Silverlight to do drag and drop: the Silverlight Toolkit DragDropTarget controls, the Telerik DragAndDropManager, and the C1 DragAndDropManager. At the end of day, I intended to allow users drop some sort of code snippet object into the editor, just like dropping a control from the toolbox windows to the code windows in visual studio.

Hi Leon,

Yes the problem here is that there could be several views (in the WPF version, not the SL version but they share the same codebase) and we need to ensure the current view is the one with focus so that we don't see carets in all the views when SyntaxEditor gets focus. So I'm not thinking we can really alter our logic that is preventing it from showing when not focused.

That being said, I thought of an alternative. We have a very rich adornments framework in the product. You could make an adornment layer for showing a faux caret while your drag operation is active. There are several samples on making adornments. The smoke text one might be a good starting point for this. Just make a custom adornment layer and render a caret rectangle at the appropriate location. Then remove the adornment layer once the drag ends or leaves the SyntaxEditor.