Recently I had to render barcodes in a WPF client and had to be able to print them as well.
On this project we were using DevExpress controls, but the Barcode control (at least till version 13.1) was only available for reporting. There was no ‘regular’ WPF control to display barcodes on screen.
I first tried using a Barcode font. I found the website of John T Barton with lots of info about barcodes. Downloaded the latest version of the EAN128 font from the website of Grand Zebu, but unfortunately I ran into problems with the first barcodes I tried (“MSN12345” and “MSN00000”). One of the characters created by the code from the site (to calculate checksum and some compression) wasn’t supported by the font.
After some extra research on the internet I quickly came across the Zen Barcode Rendering framework on Codeplex. This free framework looked like the answer to my problems/requirements.
Unfortunately, it targeted ASP.NET, SSRS and WinForms, but no WPF. So …. no luck there. But, as the framework is an open source project, I downloaded the code and started investigating if it would be possible to make some modifications so it could be used by WPF clients. Continue reading