Author: mariuselvert

The best of both worlds: scoped_flags

C++11 introduced a pretty nice change to enum types in C++, the scoped enumeration. They mostly supersede the old unscoped enumeration, which was inherited from C and had a few shortcomings. For example, the names in the enumeration where added to its parent scope. This means that given an enum colors {red, green blue}; you can simply say auto my_color = red;. This can, of course, lead to ambiguities and people using some weird workarounds like putting the enums in namespaces or prefixing all elements á la hungarian-notation. Also, unscoped enumerations are not particularly type-safe: they can be converted to integer types and back without any special consideration, so you can write things like int x = red; without the compiler complaining.
Scoped enumerations improves both theses aspects: with enum class colors {red, green, blue};, you have to use auto my_color = colors::red; and int x = colors::red; will simply not compile.
To get the second part to compile, you need to insert a static_cast: int x = static_cast(colors::red); which is purposefully a lot more verbose. Now this is a bit of a blessing and a curse. Of course, this is a lot more type-safe, but it make one really common usage pattern with enums very cumbersome: bit flags.

Did this get worse?

While you could previously use the bit operators to combine different bitmasks defined as enums, scoped enumerations will only let you do that if you cast them first. In other words, type-safety prevents us from combining flags because the result might, of course, no longer be a valid enum.
However, we can still get the convenience and compactness of bit flags with a type that represents combinations bitmasks from a specific enum type. Oh, this reeks of a template. I give you scoped_flags, which you can use like this:

enum class window_flags
{
  has_border = 1 << 0,
  has_caption = 1 << 1,
  is_child = 1 << 2,
  /* ... */
};
void create_window(scoped_flags<window_flags> flags);

void main()
{
  create_window({window_flags::has_border, window_flags::has_caption});
}

scoped_flags<window_flags> something = /* ... */

// Check a flag
bool is_set = something.test(window_flags::is_child);

// Remove a flag
auto no_border = something.without(window_flags::has_border);

// Add a flag
auto with_border = something.with(window_flags::has_border);

Current implementation

You can find my current implementation on this github gist. Even in its current state, I find it a niftly little utility class that makes unscoped enumerations all but legacy code.
I opted not to replicate the bitwise operator syntax, because &~ for “without” is so ugly, and ~ alone makes little sense. A non-explicit single-argument constructor makes usage with a single flag as convenient as the old C-style variant, while the list construction is just a tiny bit more complicated.
The implementation is not complete or final yet; for example without is missing an overload that gets a list of flags. After my previous adventures with initializer_lists, I’m also not entirely sure whether std::initializer_list should be used anywhere but in the c’tor. And maybe CTAD could make it more comfortable? Of course, everything here can be constexpr‘fied. Do you think this is a useful abstraction? Any ideas for improvements? Do tell!

std::initializer_list considered evil

I am so disappointed in you, std::initializer_list. You are just not what I thought you were.

Lights out

While on the train to Meeting C++ this year, I was working on the lighting subsystem of the 3D renderer for my game abstractanks. Everything was looking fine, until I switched to the release build. Suddenly, my sun light went out. All the smaller lights were still there, it just looked like night instead of day.
Now stuff working in Debug and not working in Release used to be quite common and happens when you’re not correctly initializing built-in variables. So I went digging, but it was not as easy as I had thought. Several hours later, I tracked the problem down to my global light’s uniform buffer initialization code. This is a buffer that is sent to the GPU so the shaders can read all the lighting information. It looked like a fairly innocent for-loop doing byte-copies of matrices and vectors to a buffer:

using Pair = std::pair;
auto Mapping = std::initializer_list{
  {ShadowMatrix.ptr(), MATRIX_BYTE_SIZE},
  {LightDirection.ptr(), VECTOR4_BYTE_SIZE},
  {ColorAndAmbient.ptr(), VECTOR4_BYTE_SIZE}
};

std::size_t Offset = 0;
for (auto const& Each : Mapping)
{
  mUniformBuffer.SetSubData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, Each.second, Offset, Each.first);
  Offset += Each.second;
}

The Culprit

After mistakenly blaming alignment issues for a while, I finally tried looking at the values of Each.second and Each.first. To my surprise, they were bogus. Now what is going on there? It turns out not writing this in almost-always-auto style, i.e. using direct- instead of copy-initialization fixes the problem, so there’s definitely a lifetime issue here.

Looking at the docs, it became apparent that std::initializer_list is indeed a reference-type that automatically creates a value-type (the backing array) internally and keeps it alive exactly as binding a reference to that array would. For the common cases, i.e. when std::initializer_list is used as a parameter, this is fine, because the original list lives for the whole function-call expression. For the direct-initialization case, this is also fine, since the reference-like lifetime-extension kicks in. But for copy-initialization, the right-hand-side is done after the std::initializer_list is copied. So the backing array is destroyed. Oops.

Conclusion and alternatives

Do not use std::initializer_list unless as a function parameter. It works well for that, and is surprising for everything else. In my case, a naive “extract variable” refactoring of for (auto const& each : {a, b, c}) { /* ... */ } led me down this rabbit hole.
My current alternative is stupidly simple: a built-in array on the stack:

using Pair = std::pair;
Pair Mapping[]{
  {ShadowMatrix.ptr(), MATRIX_BYTE_SIZE},
  {LightDirection.ptr(), VECTOR4_BYTE_SIZE},
  {ColorAndAmbient.ptr(), VECTOR4_BYTE_SIZE}
};

It does the same thing as the “correct” version of the std::initializer_list, and if you try to use it AAA-style, at least clang will give you this nice warning: warning: temporary whose address is used as value of local variable 'Mapping' will be destroyed at the end of the full-expression [-Wdangling]

Transposition as a programming technique

If you have been programming for a while, you will probably, and hopefully, agree that it is preferable to have a sequence of functions as opposed to the same number of functions nested. In other words, call-graph breadth is better than depth. Among other reasons, a “linear” set of instructions is often easier to follow, which is better for humans, and also tends to not go haywire with what memory it touches, which is better for computers.
However, deep call hierarchies occur much more than I would like. I have seen call stacks well beyond 200 functions deep. But this need not be – one can often be turned into the other by transposition. Transposition derives from the latin transponere, which roughly means “to put across”. With matrices, it means swapping rows and columns. Similarly, we can swap call-hierarchy depth for breath.

The example

A couple of months ago, I was tasked with programming a standing-wave display of power-line voltage curves. As you might know, the signal is roughly sine-wave shaped at about 50Hz. The signal is captured in time windows of 200ms, i.e. there’s a new packet of data 5 times a second with 10 sine cycles in it. However, the frequency value jitters just enough to make the signal drift a bit in the 200ms window, i.e. the wave moves forwards and backwards a little bit. The standing-wave feature tries to remove that drift and make it seemingly stationary in our fixed time window, so changes in amplitude become more visible.

Algorithm 1

The idea seems simple enough for just one signal:

  1. In the previous wave, search backwards to find the spot where the wave crosses from positive to negative.
  2. Take the previous wave from that point on and stitch it together with the current one, and cut that off at 200ms of data.

But there is not just one signal, there can be hundreds. And they should all be aligned to one designated “master” signal. So now we add extra steps:

  1. For all other signals, find the wave packets overlapping (in time) with our new stiched wave packet.
  2. Order them, and stitch them to a new wave packet covering exactly the same time window.

Now even in this version, finding the right packets for a time interval can be more tricky than it seems, because the values for the signals come in irregularly and can be shifted significantly. So you can just buffer of the last N (5?) packets for each signal and search in there. Still, one more requirement remains. For the display of archived data, the algorithm should work on batches of waves, i.e. many seconds worth, which made step 3 harder by extending the search space. So add:

  1. For each previous and current pair in a given time-interval:

Now the whole thing was pretty much implemented with steps 0 to 4 being functions calling into the next step, with major loops on the 0th and 3rd step. The wave data flows through these implementation layers vertically, i.e. from step 0 to step 4 and back, but the control flow of the program does not. It flows perpendicular to it, horizontally, solely controlled by the outer-most loop. It is intuitive to write it this way – after all, the control flow follows the flow of time in the data we are processing, but the code was not particularly easy, especially with the search in step 3 becoming unnecessarily complex.

Algorithm 2

Now let us try transposing this, and match the flow of data with our control flow:

  1. Gather all relevant signals for the time interval and sort their packets.
  2. Extract all the “stitching” time codes from the master signal.
  3. For all signals, traverse pairs together with the time codes and stitch accordingly.

The whole process becomes more digestible, and processing the data in stages made it obvious that sorted data makes using a “merge” type algorithm very easy.
Both algorithms use the same data, but the second makes it explicit, while the first just passes it through the call-stack in chunks.

Conclusion

I have since used this idea of “transposition” a few times to clean up and simplify my designs. It seems especially helpful when trying to decouple messaging from bulk processing.
The idea of looking at the data flow and adapting the control flow to match it, is central to data-oriented design. I argue that while this can be used to optimized programs, transposition is mainly a tool to make programs simpler, which can then lead to optimization. Separating processing into stages is also very similar to loop-fission.
Have you used a technique like this before? Do you, perhaps, know it by another name? Let me know!

xBase gotchas

For the last year, I have regularly worked on a legacy project written in xBase / Clipper, which is a dialect of the dBase programming language. The language as a whole is surprisingly comfortable for its age, being 40 years old now. But there were a few quite infuriating things I stumbled upon:

Trailing commas in arrays

The language allows you to define array contents inline like this:

myArray := { 1, "foo", .t., 4.0 }

It is also dynamically typed, as you can see in this example – where the array holds numbers, strings and boolean (logical) values. Now sometimes, you want to spread-out an array initialization over multiple lines. xBase lets you do that – using the semi-colon quite contrary to many other languages – to continue a line:

myArray := {;
  "foo",;
  "bar";
}

Now you might be temped, as I was, to write it like this instead:

myArray := {;
  "foo",;
  "bar",;
}

With a trailing comma. But, gotcha, that does not do what you probably expect. This actually creates an array with 3 elements, where the last element is nil.

Unequal is not not-equals

xBase has both the == and the != operators. But imagine my suprise when and if a != b was not entered, with what had to be unequal strings. I added some logging (yea, no debugger) and saw that I indeed had the strings "" and "foo". Still, a != b seemed to evaluate to false. Because I could not believe that, I changed it to !(a == b) – and it worked!

It turns out that the != operator is not the opposite of the == operator, but rather of the = operator (xBase uses := for assignment). The = operator, however, implements some kind of “fuzzy” equals by default, also evaluating true if the left operand is a prefix of the right operand. This is a behaviour that can be changed globally by “SET EXACT on”. Wow.

Have unregistered classes throw with the unity DI container

The unity container (not to be confused with game engine) is one of the most popular dependency injection tools for C#.
However, by default the unity container will try to Resolve() all classes that it can. If you do not register a class, it will will often just succeed anyways.
I much prefer explicitly registering classes, and resolution just throwing and exception if I try to resolve something I did not register.
There’s a viable solution for that on stackoverflow, but it fails to throw when trying to resolve a class that was only registered via its interface.
Here’s our fixed version:

public class UnityRegistrationTracking : UnityContainerExtension
{
  private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<NamedTypeBuildKey, bool> registrations =
    new ConcurrentDictionary<NamedTypeBuildKey, bool>();

  protected override void Initialize()
  {
    base.Context.Registering += Context_Registering;
    base.Context.Strategies.Add(
        new ValidateRegistrationStrategy(this.registrations), UnityBuildStage.Setup);
  }

  private void Context_Registering(object sender, RegisterEventArgs e)
  {
    var buildKey = new NamedTypeBuildKey(e.TypeFrom, e.Name);
    this.registrations.AddOrUpdate(buildKey, true,
      (key, oldValue) => true);
  }

  public class ValidateRegistrationStrategy : BuilderStrategy
  {
    private ConcurrentDictionary<NamedTypeBuildKey, bool> registrations;

    public ValidateRegistrationStrategy(ConcurrentDictionary<NamedTypeBuildKey, bool> registrations)
    {
      this.registrations = registrations;
    }

    public override void PreBuildUp(ref BuilderContext context)
    {
        var buildKey = new NamedTypeBuildKey(context.RegistrationType, context.Name);
        if (!this.registrations.ContainsKey(buildKey))
        {
          throw new ResolutionFailedException(buildKey.Type, buildKey.Name,
            string.Format("Type {0} was not explicitly registered in the container.", buildKey.Type.Name));
        }
    }
  }
}

We hook into two parts of the unity API here:

  1. The registration, which is called when you call Unity.RegisterType
  2. The resolution process, which is called when unity tries to resolve a specific instance.

The first part happens in Context_Registering. We just store the registration in dictionary for later. It is important to use TypeFrom as a key, since we want to refer to objects by the interfaces they are registered with, not their concrete implementations.
The second part is the ValidateRegistrationStrategy. All registered BuilderStrategy objects go in a list that is processed when an object is built. The UnityBuildStage.Setup acts as a sorting key, to make sure that this strategy is executed as early as possible.
In the strategy, we check whether the requested type was previously registered, and throw an exception if it was not. It is important to use context.RegistrationType here, since context.Type will again contain the concrete type, and not the interface.

Non-determinism in C++

A deterministic program, when given the same input, will always result in the same output. This intuitive, albeit quite fuzzily defined, property is often times pretty important for correct program. Sources of non-determinism can be quite subtle – and once they creep into your program, they can propagate and amplify and have enormous consequences. It is pretty much the well-known butterfly effect.

When discussing this problem, it is important to know what exactly makes up the input and the output of the program. For example, when logging times to a logfile, and considering this an actual output, no two runs will ever be the same – so this is usually not considered an output relevant for determinism. Which brings us to the first common source of non-determinism:

Time

If any part of your program depends on the time it is run at, it will be easily be non-deterministic. Common cases are using the time to initializing some variable depending on the time, or using the time for some kind of numerical integration, like computing a value over time. Also, using execution time as an output respective for determinism is hopeless on a normal desktop computer – but can be crucial for a real-time system.

Random number generation

Random number generation seems like an obvious candidate, yet most random number generators are not really random, but only pseudo-random. For example, std::mersenne_twister_engine will generate the same sequence of values every time, when initialized with the same seed. So do not initialize this with a non-deterministic input like the time, and it will be predictable. However, std::random_device might not share this property and give you fresh non-deterministic input. As a weird middle ground, std::default_random_engine will probably give you the same results when compiled with the same compiler/standard-lib, but on another compiler version or OS, it will not. Subtle.

The allocator

Another source of non-determinism that is pretty tricky is the allocator. For example, consider the following piece of code:

template <class T>
T sum(std::set<Thingy*> const& set)
{
  T result{};
  for (auto const& each : set)
    result += each->value();
  return result;
}

Is this deterministic or not? It depends. Now let’s assume that all the Thingys were allocated using standard new. In that case, the actual pointers, Thingy* are non-deterministic, and hence the order of the Thingy*s in the set is random. But does this matter? Well if T is std::uint32_t, it does not. Order in addition does not matter for unsigned integers, even with overflows. However, if T is float, then it does matter and the whole result becomes unpredictable, at least in the general case (it will even be predictable, if e.g. all the numbers in the computation are integers that are exactly representable as floats). Other languages have “insertion-ordered” containers to get around this problem. A sensible approximation in C++ is to use the (unordered_)set and (unordered_)map containers together with another list to iterate on.

The thread scheduler

When you cannot really control the order of instructions, which is really the whole point of threading, you will have a harder time making things deterministic. Like the allocator problem, this is usually also paired with floating-point arithmetic. The workaround here is to make sure that the order of computation does not influence the final result. One common way around this is to sort the output by a unique criteria. For example, if you use multiple threads to report the intersections of a bunch of line segments, you can later sort them by their position in space.

There’s of course the honorable mention for uninitialized variables, but I’m sure your static analyzer will complain about it. Any interaction with the “outside” of your program, any side-effect, be it filesystems, user input, output or cosmic radiation can lead to non-determinism, so be sure to know the context well enough and plan accordingly to your determinism requirements.

Integrating conan, CMake and Jenkins

In my last posts on conan, I explained how to start migrating your project to use a few simple conan libraries and then how to integrate a somewhat more complicated library with custom build steps.

Of course, you still want your library in CI. We previously advocated simply adding some dependencies to your source tree, but in other cases, we provisioned our build-systems with the right libraries on a system-level (alternatively, using docker). Now using conan, this is all totally different – we want to avoid setting up too many dependencies on our build-system. The fewer dependencies they have, the less likely they will accidentally be used during compilation. This is crucial to implement portability of your artifacts.

Setting up the build-systems

The build systems still have to be provisioned. You will at least need conan and your compiler-suite installed. Whether to install CMake is a point of contention – since the CMake-Plugin for Jenkins can do that.

Setting up the build job

The first thing you usually need is to configure your remotes properly. One way to do this is to use conan config install command, which can synchronize remotes (or the whole of the conan config) from either a folder, a zip file or a git repository. Since I like to have stuff readable in plain text in my repository, I opt to store my remotes in a specific folder. Create a new folder in your repository. I use ci/conan_config in this example. In it, place a remotes.txt like this:

bincrafters https://api.bintray.com/conan/bincrafters/public-conan True
conan-center https://conan.bintray.com True

Note that conan needs a whole folder, you cannot read just this file. Your first command should then be to install these remotes:

conan config install ci/conan_config

Jenkins’ CMake for conan

The next step prepares for installing our dependencies. Depending on whether you’re building some of those dependencies (the --build option), you might want to have CMake available for conan to call. This is a problem when using the Jenkins CMake Plugin, because that only gives you cmake for its specific build steps, while conan simply uses the cmake executable by default. If you’re provisioning your build-systems with conan or not building any dependencies, you can skip this step.
One way to give conan access to the Jenkins CMake installation is to run a small CMake script via a “CMake/CPack/CTest execution” step and have it configure conan appropriatly. Create a file ci/configure_for_conan.cmake:

execute_process(COMMAND conan config set general.conan_cmake_program=\"${CMAKE_COMMAND}\")

Create a new “CMake/CPack/CTest execution” step with tool “CMake” and arguments “-P ci/configure_for_conan.cmake”. This will setup conan with the given cmake installation.

Install dependencies and build

Next run the conan install command:

mkdir build && cd build
conan install .. --build missing

After that, you’re ready to invoke cmake and the build tool with an additional “CMake Build” step. The build should now be up and running. But who am I kidding, the build is always red on first try 😉

Using protobuf with conan and CMake

In my last post, I showed how I got my feet wet while migrating the dependencies of my existing code-base to conan. The first major hurdle I saw coming when I started was adding something with a “special” build step, e.g. something like source-preprocessing. In my case, this was protobuf, where a special build-step converts .proto files to sources and headers.

In my previous solution, my devenv build scripts would install the protobuf converter binary to my devenv’s bin/ folder, which I then used to run my preprocessing. At first, it was not obvious how to do this with conan. It turns out that the lovely people and bincrafters made this pretty comfortable. conan_basic_setup() will add all required package paths to your CMAKE_MODULE_PATH, which you can use to include() some bundled CMake scripts that will either let you execute the protobuf-compiler via a target or run protobuf_generate to automagically handle the preprocessing. It’s probably worth noting, that this really depends on how the package is made. Conan does not really have an official way on how to handle this.

Let’s start with some sample code – Person.proto, like the sample from the protobuf website:

message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

And some sample code that uses it:

#include "Person.pb.h"

int main(int argn, char** argv)
{
  Person message;
  message.set_name("Hello Protobuf");
  std::cout << message.name() << std::endl;
}

Again, we’re using the bincrafters repository for our dependencies in a conanfile.txt:

[requires]
protobuf/3.6.1@bincrafters/stable
protoc_installer/3.6.1@bincrafters/stable

[options]

[generators]
cmake

Now we just need to wire it all up in the CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)
project(ProtobufTest)

include(${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/conanbuildinfo.cmake)
conan_basic_setup(TARGETS KEEP_RPATHS)

# This loads the cmake/protoc-config.cmake file
# from the protoc_installer dependency
include(cmake/protoc-config)

set(TARGET_NAME ProtobufSample)

# Just add the .proto files to the target
add_executable(${TARGET_NAME}
  Person.proto
  ProtobufTest.cpp
)

# Let this function to the magic
protobuf_generate(TARGET ${TARGET_NAME})

# Need to use protobuf, of course
target_link_libraries(${TARGET_NAME}
  PUBLIC CONAN_PKG::protobuf
)

# Make sure we can find the generated headers
target_include_directories(${TARGET_NAME}
  PUBLIC ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}
)

There you have it! Pretty neat, and all without a brittle find_package call.

Migrating an existing C++ codebase to conan

This is a bit of a battle report of migrating the dependencies in my C++ projects to use the conan package manager.
In the past weeks I have started to use conan in half a dozen both work and personal projects. Here’s my experiences so far.

Before

The first real project I started with was my personal game project. The “before” setup used a mixture if techniques to handle dependencies and uses CMake to do most of the heavy lifting.
Most dependencies reside in the “devenv”, which is a separate CMake project that I use to build and bundle the dependencies in a specific installation folder. It uses ExternalProject_Add for most parts (e.g. Boost, SDL, Lua, curl and OpenSSL), add_subdirectory for a few others (pugixml and lz4) and just install(FILES...) for a few header only libs like JSON for Modern C++, Catch2 and spdlog. It should be noted that there are relatively few interdependencies between the projects in there.
Because it is more convenient to update, I keep a few dependencies that I control myself directly in the source tree, either as git externals or just copies of the source files.
I try to keep usage of system dependencies to a minimum so that the resulting binary is more portable to the average gamer who does not want to know about libraries and dependencies and such nonsense. This setup has been has been mostly painless and working for my three platforms Windows, Linux and Mac – at least as long as I did not try to change it significantly.

Baby steps

Since not all my dependencies are available on conan and small iterations are usually more successful, I decided to proceed by changing only a single dependency to conan. For this dependency, it’s a good idea to pick something that does not have many compile-time options and is more or less platform agnostic. So I opted for boost over, e.g. SDL or wxWidgets. Boost was also one of the most painful dependencies to build, if only for the insane amount of files it produces and the time it takes to copy those ten-thousands of files to the install location.

Getting started..

There are currently two popular variants of boost available through conan. The “normal” variant on conan’s main repository/remote “conan-center” and a modular version that splits boost into its component libraries on the bincrafters remote, e.g. Boost.Filesystem. The modular version is more appealing conceptually, and I also had a better time getting it to work in my first tests, so I picked that. I did a quick grep for #include <boost/ through my code for an initial guess which boost libraries I needed to get and created a corresponding conanfile.txt in my project root.

[requires]
boost_filesystem/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_math/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_random/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_property_tree/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_assign/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_heap/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_optional/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_program_options/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_iostreams/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_system/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable

[options]
boost:shared=False

[generators]
cmake

Now conan plays really nice with “single configuration generators” like the new CMake/Ninja support in VS2017 and onward. Basically, just cd into your build dir and call something like conan install -s build_type=Debug -s build_type=x86 whenever you want to update dependencies. More info can be found in the official documentation. The workflow for CLion is essentially the same.

Using it in your build

After the last command, conan will download (or build) the dependencies and generate a file with all the corresponding paths.
To use it, include it from cmake like this:

include(${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/conanbuildinfo.cmake)
conan_basic_setup(TARGETS KEEP_RPATHS)

It will then provide targets for all the requested boost libraries that you can link to like this:

target_link_libraries(myTarget
  PUBLIC CONAN_PKG::boost_filesystem
)

I wanted to make sure that the compiler build using the new boost files and not the old ones. Because I have a generic include into my devenv that was still going to be in my compilers include-paths for all the other dependencies, so I just renamed boost’s header include folder on disc. After my first successful compile I felt confident enough to delete them.

First problems

There was one major problem: some of my in-source dependencies had their own claim on using boost via passed CMake variables, Boost_LIBRARY_DIRS and Boost_INCLUDE_DIR. I adapted their CMakeLists.txt to allow for injecting appropriate targets instead. Not the cleanest solution, but it got my builds green again fast.

There’s a still a lot to cover on this: The other platforms had their own quirks and I migrated way more than just this first project. Also, there is still ways to go for a full migration with my game project. But more on that in my next blog post…

Using WPF-Toolkits CheckComboBox with Data-Binding

Xceed’s WPF Toolkit is a popular extension to the standard components offered by Microsoft’s WPF. One fancy control that I have been using lately is the CheckComboBox, which is a ComboBox that show’s a list of items and checkboxes when opened and a list of selected items when closed. For example, it is great for selecting filtering options in smaller sets.
However, it took me a little bit to get it all up and running with DataBinding. I am going to walk you throught it. For reference, I’m starting with a .NET 4.6.1 WPF App in Visual Studio 2017.

First you have to install Extended.Wpf.Toolkit, which I am doing via VS’s built-in package manager. To actually use the control, I am adding an XML namespace into my MainWindow’s XAML:

xmlns:xctk="http://schemas.xceed.com/wpf/xaml/toolkit"

Then I’m adding the control in a simple StackPanel, while already adding DataBindings:

<xctk:CheckComboBox
  ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Options}"
  DisplayMemberPath="Name"
  SelectedMemberPath="Selected"/>

This means that my control will look at a collection named “Options” in my view-model, using it’s elements “Name” property for display and its “Selected” property for the checkmark. If you run the program at this point, you should be able to see an empty CheckComboBox, albeit badly layouted.

Now it’s time to create the view model. Let’s start with a small class-let to represent our items:

class Item
{
  public string Name { get; set; }
  public bool Selected { get; set; }
}

As you can see, the names match what we set for DisplayMemberPath and SelectedMemberPath in the XAML. Now for the ViewModel class:

class ViewModel
{
  public ViewModel()
  {
    var languages = new string[]
    {
      "C", "C#", "C++", "D", "Java",
      "Rust", "Python", "ES6"
    };
    
    Options = new List<Item>();
    foreach (var language in languages)
    {
      Options.Add(new Item {
          Name = language,
          Selected = true });
    }
  }
  
  public List<Item> Options { get; set; }
}

If you run it at this point, you should be able to see an all-selected list of programming languages in the drop-down. But it is lacking a crucial detail: it is not observable, meaning the component will not be notified if the data in the view-model is changed by other means. To make sure that it can, the Item list and the Item have to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. To do that, you have to fire a specific event whenever a property changes with the name of that property in it.

Let’s do that for the Item first:

class Item : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
  private bool _selected;
  private string _name;

  public string Name
  {
      get => _name; set
      {
        _name = value;
        EmitChange(nameof(Name));
      }
  }
  public bool Selected
  {
    get => _selected; set
    {
      _selected = value;
      EmitChange(nameof(Selected));
    }
  }

  private void EmitChange(params string[] names)
  {
    if (PropertyChanged == null)
      return;
    foreach (var name in names)
      PropertyChanged(this,
        new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name));
  }

 public event PropertyChangedEventHandler
                PropertyChanged;
}

That got bigger! But it’s not a lot of meat really. For the Item list, we can just use ObservableCollection instead of List:

public ObservableCollection<Item> Options {get; set;}

That’s it. Two-way data binding set-up for the item collection, and you can now change the view-model and have the component react to it, but also react to changes from the component by hooking into the property-set functions.
Now you could also implement INotifyPropertyChanged for the ViewModel, if you intend to swap in new ObserableCollections, but that is not necessary for this example.