Nextended.UI 10.1.33

Nextended.UI

WPF and Windows desktop helpers — a global input-binding manager with hold/sequence matching, DirectInput and XInput gamepad readers, key-bind capture controls, converters, behaviours, markup extensions and runtime-defined PropertyGrid types.

📖 Documentation: English · Deutsch

Installation

dotnet add package Nextended.UI

Windows-only by design — the target frameworks carry the -windows suffix and the package references WPF, Microsoft.Xaml.Behaviors.Wpf, MouseKeyHook and SharpDX.

Feature map

Quick start

Global shortcuts, including hold and sequence

InputBindingManager sits on top of a low-level keyboard/mouse hook, so bindings fire even when your window does not have focus.

Bindings are registered under a string id, and you react to that id — so the shortcut can be rebound at runtime without touching the handler.

using System.Windows.Forms;   // Keys
using Nextended.UI.Input;

using var manager = new InputBindingManager();

// Single key or mouse button — implicit conversions from Keys, MouseButtons,
// GamepadButton and GamepadSlider mean no wrapper call is needed.
manager.RegisterBinding("emergency-stop", Keys.Escape);

// A combination
manager.RegisterBinding("command-palette",
    StoredInputBinding.Combo([Keys.ControlKey, Keys.ShiftKey, Keys.P]));

// Must be held before it counts — MinTime is in milliseconds
manager.RegisterBinding("force-quit", StoredInputBinding.Combo([Keys.Alt, Keys.F4]).SetMinTime(750));

manager.OnBindingPressed  += id => Handle(id);
manager.OnBindingReleased += id => Release(id);
manager.OnMouseMove       += e  => Track(e);

Because the manager uses a low-level hook, bindings fire even when your window does not have focus. Querying hold state directly instead of reacting to an event:

if (InputBindingManager.IsHoldingBinding("emergency-stop")) { … }

TimeSpan held = InputBindingManager.GetHoldingTime("emergency-stop");

if (InputBindingManager.IsHoldingBindingFor("force-quit", TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2))) { … }

binding.Flatten() expands a combo into its parts — handy for rendering a shortcut in the UI — and WithoutMinTime() returns a copy without the hold requirement. InputSequenceMatcher handles ordered sequences (the Konami-code shape) rather than simultaneous combinations.

Letting the user rebind a shortcut

StartListeningForBinding puts the manager into capture mode: the next input becomes the new binding for that id and is reported through OnBindingSet.

manager.OnBindingSet += (id, binding) => settings.Save(id, binding);
manager.StartListeningForBinding("command-palette");

The bundled controls wrap that flow:

<nx:KeyBindChanger x:Name="Changer" />
<nx:KeyBindSequenceBox x:Name="SequenceBox" />

Changer.KeyBindChanged += (_, e) => settings.Save(e.NewValue);   // e.OldValue is there too
Changer.KeyDeleted     += (_, _) => settings.Clear();
SequenceBox.Changed    += (_, sequence) => settings.SaveSequence(sequence);

KeyDisplayName / KeyLocalizer turn a key into the label the user expects, localised — so OemQuestion shows up as the key actually printed on their keyboard layout.

Gamepads

using Nextended.UI.Input.Gamepad;

using IGamepadReader pad = new XInputGamepadReader();   // or DirectInputGamepadReader

pad.ButtonEvent += (_, e) =>
{
    e.Button;         // raw code
    e.GamepadButton;  // parsed enum, null when it is not a button event
    e.IsPressed;      // null for axis/slider events
    e.Value;          // analogue value for sliders and sticks
    e.IsStickEvent;
};

XInputGamepadReader covers Xbox-style controllers; DirectInputGamepadReader covers the other devices XInput does not enumerate. Hand a reader to the binding manager with manager.AttachGamepadReader(pad) and gamepad buttons become bindings like any key.

A PropertyGrid over data that has no class

using Nextended.UI.Classes;

var custom = new CustomClass();
custom.AddProperty<string>("Host");
custom.AddProperty<int>("Port");

propertyGrid.SelectedObject = custom;

CustomClass implements ICustomTypeDescriptor, so the PropertyGrid sees real properties even though the shape was decided at runtime — the usual answer to "the settings come from a config file and I do not want to generate a class".

Rendering a control to an image

var converter = new UIElementToImageConverter();
var bitmap = converter.Convert(myControl, typeof(BitmapSource), null, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);

Supported frameworks

• net8.0-windows
• net9.0-windows
• net10.0-windows

Dependencies

• Nextended.Core
• Microsoft.Xaml.Behaviors.Wpf

The Nextended family

The other 17 packages in the suite:

Core libraries

• Nextended.Core — Foundation library — extension methods, custom types (Money, Date, BaseId, SuperType), class mapping, deep clone, encryption, hashing and the code-generation attributes.
• Nextended.Cache — Expression-based caching — automatic cache keys from method expressions, CacheProvider with condition-based invalidation, thread-safe AddOrGetExisting.

Data access

• Nextended.EF — Entity Framework Core extensions — graph loading (LoadGraphAsync, IncludeAll, MultiInclude), declarative include definitions, paging, dynamic sorting and bulk operations.

ASP.NET Core & web

• Nextended.Web — ASP.NET Core utilities — zero-config OData (AddODataAuto), composable IQueryable OData appliers, strongly typed controller URLs, streaming download helpers and a background executor that can replay a captured request.
• Nextended.ResponseFilters — Fluent, provider-agnostic pipeline that redacts, masks, rounds, truncates, hashes, prunes and restructures response DTOs before serialization — per request, per user, per permission.
• Nextended.ResponseFilters.AspNetCore — ASP.NET Core adapter for Nextended.ResponseFilters — registers the pipeline as a global IAsyncResultFilter and replays structural edits against the serialized JSON tree.

UI libraries

• Nextended.Blazor — Blazor helpers — IBrowserFile extensions (bytes, data URLs, downloads), a hierarchical model for browsing inside uploaded zip/tar/rar archives, MIME-type detection and component-parameter reflection.
• Nextended.UI — WPF and Windows desktop helpers — a global input-binding manager with hold/sequence matching, DirectInput and XInput gamepad readers, key-bind capture controls, converters, behaviours, markup extensions and runtime-defined PropertyGrid types. (this package)

Code generation & tooling

• Nextended.Imaging — Image processing — aspect-preserving resize, crop, colour replacement, brightness-based foreground picking, thumbnail generation, byte/data-URL conversion and MIME detection from magic bytes.
• Nextended.CodeGen — Roslyn source generator — DTOs and interfaces from your entities, strongly typed classes from JSON/XML, lookup tables from Excel, and documentation from source files.

.NET Aspire hosting

• Nextended.Aspire — Conditional AppHost builder extensions — WithReferenceIf / WaitForIf / WithExplicitStartIf, strongly typed environment variables from config objects, HTTPS dev-cert wiring, Docker guards, GitHub-source resources and npm app discovery.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.Supabase — The complete Supabase stack — Postgres, Auth (GoTrue), REST, Realtime, Storage, Studio, Kong and Edge Functions — as one composable Aspire resource.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.N8n — The n8n workflow-automation platform as an Aspire resource, with Postgres persistence, workflow import and a typed client for triggering workflows from .NET.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.Grafana — Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Promtail, cAdvisor, postgres_exporter and the OpenTelemetry Collector as composable resources with auto-provisioned datasources.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.WebDataStudio — WebDataStudio — a browser database studio for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, Oracle, DuckDB, ClickHouse, MongoDB and Redis — wired to the databases of your stack, with accounts and roles, an optional SQL assistant, and an MCP endpoint for AI agents.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.AspireUI — AspireUI — the visual AppHost builder — as a resource inside your own Aspire stack, with an optional pre-seeded admin user and a starter stack built from your project paths.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.LocalAI — Self-hosted, OpenAI-compatible multimodal AI — image generation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text and video — with gallery model management, GPU support and Open WebUI.
• Nextended.Aspire.Hosting.Php — Run PHP endpoints inside your Aspire stack — a docroot folder or a single router script served by PHP's built-in web server, with php.ini settings as fluent options.

Links

• 📦 NuGet package
• 📖 Documentation — English
• 📖 Dokumentation — Deutsch
• 🏠 Documentation portal
• 🧑‍💻 Source code
• 🐛 Report an issue

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.