Develop Reference

WPF hide slider track

I'm using WPF (and the MVVM framework) to create an interface which has a slider on it.
<Slider Value="{Binding MotorDemandSpeed}" Maximum="3500" />
I'm trying to hide the track part on the slider so that you are left with just the 'thumb tack'. This is what the slider currently looks like (styles are controlled by a theme):
I've looked around at various methods, however I can't find a method that changes only a single slider.
Help is appreciated.

You need to set the Template property of this particular Slider instance to be able to override its ControlTemplate:
<Slider Value="{Binding MotorDemandSpeed}" Maximum="3500">
<Slider.Template>
<ControlTemplate TargetType="Slider">
<!-- define the custom template without a track here... -->
</ControlTemplate>
</Slider.Template>
</Slider>

In order to change the appearance of a control you will need to modify the control template. Each control is made up of many parts, and each part many objects. You can modify individual parts (such as the track) with the correct x:Key and TargetType.
This Question has an example of modifying a scrollbar control template, which is most likely similar to the template of this slider you have. The first step would be to identify the Xaml file in your theme which this slider uses and find the parts that define the trackbar, thumb, etc. From there you should be able to recreate the control to your liking, or just completely remove parts you do not need.
Are you using any third party controls that may have information on how to edit their themes? Perhaps try investigating Modifying Control Templates to get a better understanding of control templates.
Here is the MDSN page for the slider control template, you may find this useful.

Do I need dependency properties for all basic properties on my user control?

I am currently writing my first user control which would consist of a label and a text box in a stack panel like follows:
<Grid>
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" DataContext="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource Self}}">
<Label Content="{Binding Label}" Width="60"></Label>
<TextBox Text="{Binding TextBoxContent}" Width="60"/>
</StackPanel>
</Grid>
This will be most useful to be in a settings page, as it will be reused for several different settings. With each of these settings, I will want to set (at a minimum) the width, height, validation rule and error template properties. As for the text itself, I have already created a dependency property both for the label and the text box (as you can see in my snippet above).
My question is this: Do I need to create a dependency property for all of the properties I just mentioned that I would like to set when I actually use my user control? This seems like redundant work (since they already exist on the text box, basically they would just redirect my user control's property to the text box's property of the same name)? This is even more work if I want to use even more properties on my text box (for example, AcceptsReturn, etc).

The redundant work can be saved if you decide to derive from TextBox rather than UserControl - just think of your control as a "labeled textbox" and all you need to do is derive from TextBox and add the needed dependency properties to accommodate for the label. This of course would not be the case for more complex user controls, but it seems OK in your case.
The downside to this though is that you'll have to take the default control template for TextBox and work with it to add your label, which may be a bit trickier.
Either way, I recommend having a look at the Control Authoring Overview page on MSDN, which is extremely useful when writing your first controls in WPF.

Managing keyboard focus with custom TextBox control template

Currently I'm working on a WPF project which has defined a custom style for TextBox. Among other things, we override the default control template for the TextBox. The control template looks like this (I've removed a lot of the TemplateBinding stuff since it's not relevant).
<Border>
<Grid>
<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
<ColumnDefinition Width="Auto"/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<ScrollViewer x:Name="PART_ContentHost"
IsTabStop="False"
Background="{x:Null}"
VerticalAlignment="Center"
BorderThickness="0"/>
<ContentPresenter Grid.Column="1" Margin="5,0,0,0" Focusable="False"
Content="{TemplateBinding local:UnitConversion.Info}"
ContentTemplateSelector="{DynamicResource SelectorKey}"/>
</Grid>
</Border>
Essentially this just adds a ContentPresenter to display a combo box allowing the user to select different units to be used for display or entry into the text box. The template selector simply selects between the user control (which is really just a ComboBox) or an empty template if the text box doesn't have any associated unit data (the content is null).
The Problem
Since this combo box is essentially part of the text box control template, interacting with the combo box gives keyboard focus to the text box without actually placing the caret into the visual text box. Elsewhere we have a keyboard control which is ultimately made visible when a text box gets keyboard focus (the keyboard itself is actually listening for custom routed events, but these are ultimately raised when a TextBox gets focus.
The Question
Is there any way I can prevent the text box from getting focus when anything other than the actual text entry is what technically got focus? My desired behavior is that manipulating the combo box doesn't result in the on-screen keyboard popping up.
My gut instinct here tells me that I can't actually do what I want since all the focus logic happens at the TextBox level and it doesn't really care much about the contents of the control template. But I'm just curious if anyone might be able to think of some kind of workaround.
I'd like to avoid introducing a custom text box control to handle this since we don't much like the idea of application-specific custom controls (especially considering how far we've gotten with the current one).

Disable StackPanel Highlighting in XAML

I have found very little information about this matter. Know that I am a newbie to C# and WPF:
I have a stack panel defined in a XAML file as such :
<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" >
<TextBlock Text="Locale: " VerticalAlignment="Center"/>
<ComboBox x:Name="comboLocale" Width="60" VerticalAlignment="Center" SelectionChanged="comboLocale_SelectionChanged"/>
</StackPanel>
I want to disable the highlighting that happens when I MouseOver the stack panel, which creates a blue color inside the StackPanel for some reason. I don't have any special style set up yet. Some threads talked about setting OverridesDefaultStyle to TRUE, but this didn't seem to change anything. Also, StackPanel do not have a ControlTemplate available, so most of the solutions I found couldn't be applied since they refer to a Button or TextBlock.
Any input on the matter would be greatly appreciated!
-Regards

StackPanels in general have no visual representation and are just layout containers which control placement of other elements. Given that you haven't set anything like Background on your StackPanel, it isn't what's causing the highlight you're seeing unless some other part of your XAML or code is modifying it. The behavior you describe sounds like the default behavior of a Button but without seeing more of your code it's hard to tell where the behavior is coming from.

Since you mentioned in a comment you've found out you're actually looking at the expected behavior of a Menu as your culprit. You'll just need to edit the MenuItem Control Template, more specifically the IsHighlighted that's causing your highlight. You'd likely find something like this helpful.
Or there's lots more various information found with a quick search for customizing a WPF Menu / MenuItem, hope this helps.

WPF: How To Customize Generic Custom Window?

This is a tough question, but I'll try to explain anyway...
I have a custom control window that is used all over my applicaton. The reason I did this is because I wanted the various windows and dialog boxes to be fully customizable across my program. I.e., the minimize, maximize, close button and frame are all custom. This window is templated inside my generic.xaml. Now this works and it's all good. The idea I got was from http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/CustomFrames.aspx
Now the users of this custom window are user controls in their xaml they basically use MyWindow as their root element:
<MyWindow>
....
</MyWindow>
But now what I'm trying to do is "inject" certain elements into MyWindow from the User Control's xaml. MyWindow would simply have a container for hosting them. For example, they might want to inject a toolbar button that appears right next to the minimize button. So for example, I might have a user control that does the following (where MyWindow is the root element):
<MyWindow>
<MyWindow.ToolBar>
<Button x:Name="BlaBla"/>
</MyWindow.ToolBar>
</MyWindow>
This would put "blabla" right next to the minimize button for example. But I'm wondering if it's even possible to do this. I.e., the whole MyWindow.ToolBar thing. Is there a construct for this, is this an attached property or something weirder?

It definitely is possible, depends on your choice of types for the DependencyProperty. You could use IEnumerable and bind the MyWindow.ToolBar dp to the ItemsSource on your internal ToolBar.
<ControlTemplate>
<!-- ... snipped down to the ToolBar ... -->
<ToolBarTray>
<ToolBar x:Name="PART_ToolBar" />
</ToolBarTray>
</ControlTemplate>
With the appropriate code in OnApplyTemplate to pull PART_ToolBar and create new Binding for the ItemsSource.
EDIT: rereading your question it appears that I missed that you wanted to add this elsewhere. My suggestion then would be to use this as an object dependency property, with a ContentPresenter bound to the MyWindow.ToolBar with a Visibility set if the binding is not {x:Null}.