Single statement ScaleTransform initialization in both WPF and SL

With Silverlight using a cut-down .NET API, some decisions have been at least ackward, causing Silverlight code to be sometimes unnecesserily more complex than its WPF counterpart and WPF code needing several changes to get ported for Silverlight. In ClipFlair I’ve implemented a WPFCompatibility layer to ease compiling WPF code for Silverlight (and vice-versa too) without source code changes.

One of the missing things from Silverlight is at ScaleTransform class, where only a parameterless constructor is available. That way, whereas in WPF you can construct a ScaleTransform and initialize it in one statement, in Silverlight you need to first construct the transform and then set its X scale and Y scale in two separate (property setter) statements. Obviously this also has a small cost in performance since you end up with 3 method calls instead of a single one.

That is the WPF statement

ScaleTransform t = new ScaleTransform(someXscale, someYscale);

has to be translated in Silverlight to:

ScaleTransform t = new ScaleTransform();
t.ScaleX = someXscale;
t.ScaleY = someYscale;

 

In WPF_ScaleTransform.cs file at WPF_Compatibility project, I provide two different approaches to aid in more portable code that uses ScaleTransform:

 

1) The first approach is to create a method named “new_ScaleTransform” that takes X & Y scale parameters and returns a new ScaleTransform object and use it instead of calls to ScaleTransform’s constructor that takes X and Y scale.

public static ScaleTransform new_ScaleTransform(double scaleX, double scaleY) //unfortunately there are is no extension method mechanism for contructors in C# yet (and the ScaleTransform class is sealed so we can’t create descendent class)
{
  ScaleTransform result = new ScaleTransform();
  result.ScaleX = scaleX;
  result.ScaleY = scaleY;
  return result;
}

Since WPF_Compatibility uses two separate projects WPF_Compatibility.WPF and WPF_Compatibility.Silverlight that share the same source files (added as file links from a common Source subfolder instead of copied into the projects), there is an extra optimization that I decided to do, using a conditional compilation statement so that in WPF we use more optimal code:

public static ScaleTransform new_ScaleTransform(double scaleX, double scaleY) //unfortunately there are is no extension method mechanism for contructors in C# yet (and the ScaleTransform class is sealed so we can’t create descendent class)
{
#if SILVERLIGHT
  ScaleTransform result = new ScaleTransform();
  result.ScaleX = scaleX;
  result.ScaleY = scaleY;
#else
  ScaleTransform result = new ScaleTransform(scaleX, scaleY);
#endif 
  return result;
}

So, with the above approach one will be able to write in both WPF and Silverlight (assuming they add a “Using WPF_Compatibility;” to the top of their C# source file):

ScaleTransform t = new_ScaleTransform(someXscale, someYscale);

 

2) The second approach is to create a (static) extension method (called SetScale) for the ScaleTransform class and have that method accept X and Y scale params (apart from the implicit ScaleTransform object), which, after setting X and Y scale, should return the ScaleTransform object so that one can construct a ScaleTransform with the parameterless constructor and daisy chain a call to the SetScale method in the same statement. Since that method returns the ScaleTransform object that was passed to it (after setting X and Y scale to it), the combination behaves like a parametric constructor.

public static ScaleTransform SetScale(this ScaleTransform transform, double scaleX, double scaleY)
//can use this in both WPF and Silveright (the last one misses a parametric
//constructor) to initialize on the same statement on which we construct the
//ScaleTransform
{
  transform.ScaleX = scaleX;
  transform.ScaleY = scaleY;
  return transform; //return the transform so that it can be used in the form
  ScaleTransform t = new ScaleTransform().SetScale(scaleX, scaleY)
}

After you import the namespace WPFCompatibility (via the using statement mentioned above), where the WPF_ScaleTransform static class belongs, you can make use of this static extension method like below:

ScaleTransform t = new ScaleTransform().SetValue(someXscale, someYscale);

As an added bonus, an extra extension method is provided to set both the X and Y scale from a single parameter:

public static ScaleTransform SetScale(this ScaleTransform transform, double scale)
{
  return transform.SetScale(scale, scale);
}

Update:

In recent versions of C# (not sure if VB.net has such a feature) you can initialize multiple properties for a  new instance  in a single statement at the time of construction, so I have updated the “new_ScaleTransform” method like below. It still works at both WPF and Silverlight, while both get a single-line statement (the WPF version should still be the fastest, even though both are now one-liners).

public static ScaleTransform new_ScaleTransform(double scaleX, double scaleY)
//unfortunately there are is no extension method mechanism for contructors 
//in C# yet (and the ScaleTransform class is sealed so we can't create 
//descendent class)
{
#if SSILVERLIGHT
  ScaleTransform result = 
                   new ScaleTransform() { ScaleX = scaleX, ScaleY = scaleY };
#else
  ScaleTransform result = new ScaleTransform(scaleX, scaleY);
#endif
  return result;
}