When the pref window is opened, these are already disabled, right? why do we need this method?

yes, because it was being opened using ShowDialog(), but in this way I couldn't find how to detect when the user click outside the preferences, that's Why I'm using Show() instead so I need to disable/enable the main components of Dynamo explicitly

so you mean Show() will set PreferencesWindow.IsLoaded to true?

yes, it does it implicitly, I check the IsLoaded property for visibility purpose because even if we close the preferences view , the field reference preferencesWindow is still alive in the DynamoView class

it seems to me we are spending extra effort just to get the state of it using WPF API. I feel it's not worth the extra effort, how about when we call ShowDialog(), we set a state boolean under preferencesWindow so we can query the state? Otherwise, everytime we add a new grid, we need to remember to enable/disable this, seems like a pain

Using the ShowDialog() didn't allow me to detect when the user click outside the preferences view (main goal), when we use it we don't worry about the state because it locks the Dynamo environment.

Oh you mean even MouseLeftButtonDown event cant be triggered?

Oh you mean even MouseLeftButtonDown event cant be triggered?

exactly, now I'm trying to disable only the mainGrid ( the Dynamo main container) instead of every main part of Dynamo, I will send my findings.

@QilongTang with my last commit 14c28d2 we won't worry about enable/disable specific Dynamo parts if we add a new grid.