1. Create UI and Get Current Week's Day | Chatbot WPF C#

Design the UI using XAML and get the current week's day. Subscribe! ► https://www.youtube.com/c/QuasimodoPr... A series on creating a WPF C# chatbot. Create a new project. Use the WPF Application template. I'll name it "Alph". The .NET Framework version won't matter much. I'll go with 4.6.1. My solution and project file will share the same folder. Click OK. Use Visual Studio. Any version will do. When the project will be created, you'll have 2 associated files - .xaml and .cs. .cs is for C# coding, while .xaml serves as the view. .xaml file is divided into 2 tabs - designer and markup. Although designer can be limitedly used, it is actually for preview. In markup, we have a Grid. Let's add Grid.RowDefinitions. Put 2 RowDefinitions inside. Set the Height of the second RowDefinition to Auto. Now, let's create a TextBox where the chatbot will display its messages. It is going to be in the first Row, so set Grid.Row to 0. We are going to access it from code, so give it a name. By default, its IsReadOnly property will be set to True, so that we cannot edit the Text in it. Let's run the program. As you see, we cannot even put a cursor inside of it. In the second Row, we are going to have another Grid. This Grid is going to be divided by columns, so open the Grid.ColumnDefinitions tag. Put 2 ColumnDefinition tags inside of it. 2 columns will have width proportion of 2:1, so set the Width property of the first ColumnDefinition to "2*". Because the default Width and Height values are equal to * (star), they occupy all unused space. Number before * multiplies that space. Create a TextBox in the first column where the user will type one's messages. Let's limit its MaxLength to 50 characters. Put a button to send messages in the second column. The text displayed on top of a button is defined by the Content property. Assign a click event to this button. Right-click it and select Go to Definition... This way an event is auto-generated in C# code. Almost everything is similar to a Form.cs file. At the top, you have usings. Below goes the namespace with a default class inside of it. However, instead of a "Form", WPF uses a "Window". Inside the class, there is a Constructor which ALWAYS has the same name as the class. After the window is initialized, you can use the constructor similar to the Loaded event. I am going to create a method to define the current day. Then we call this method in the constructor. Create a string property and set its value to DateTime.Now.ToString(); In the ToString() method, set the format to "dddd" as the first argument. The second argument will be a method of a CultureInfo class. To use it, you need to include the System.Globalization using. The method we need is GetCultureInfo. In ( ) type the culture code - I'll get "en-us". Then we need to check the "day" variable's value. You can use either if and elseif or switch. The chatbot is going to display a different message on a different week day. So, in case it's Sunday, the chatbot's TextBox is going to show an appropriate message. Keep in mind that in order to make it accumulate messages instead of overwriting, you need to add text instead of just setting. So, use += instead of just = End each case block with a break keyword. I am going to duplicate the block and change as needed. Once we cover all the week's days, let's run the app. We see the correct response by a chatbot. Though we are unable to send messages yet. And the title is "MainWindow" now - gross. Of course, we will need to provide backend for the button to be able to send messages. However, let's deal with the Window's Title property first. I'm going to set it in code because I am going to use a Unicode character and the word "Alph". Let's see how it looks! Not bad. Also, let's make our chatbot react differently based on whether this is the first time you launch the program. After we set the Title, check if we already have a file with variables. For that, we need to include System.IO. The File class has a method Exists which checks if a file exists, provided you give it the file's path. If it does, we will read it using StreamReader. Create an instance of the StreamReader class. Then initialize it at once after the = character. When you initialize it, you call its constructor. We can pass the path in it. Then we are going to read the first line of the file and convert it to Boolean. We will need its value across different methods in the Window's class, so create a static bool field to store it. Then we can set its value to the converted Boolean line from the file. After that we can close the StreamReader. But if the file doesn't exist... Set the bool field to true. Then we need to check FirstTime's value. If it's true, the chatbot will introduce itself and ask for your name. Otherwise the chatbot will do something else. Check if it correctly reacts to the 1st launch. More WPF Chatbot ►    • WPF C# Chatbot