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How to get back Visual Studio's old way of alerting of suggestions by darkening code instead of by 3 dots?

Visual Studio used to alert us of unused variables by darkening them. Now (version 16.10.2) it fills the code with three dots everywhere, which look a little like code and are more confusing.
Is there a way to get the old way back?

There is a color control for the ellipses called "Suggestion Ellipses...". You could set the foreground color of it to the same color as your editors background to get a sense that its turned off. You'll still see it when you select the item though like so:

Version 16.10.3 now
It looks like they changed it back.
So if you still have it - update VS.

trackbar appearance with backcolor

How to make a trackbar like this picture? If its unachiveable with the trackbar, what other methods are there to achieve something similar?
I would have a sql populate the values too.. any suggestion on how to approach this?
An example would be for PH reading we have a set of values to be maximum and minimum, the slider would be the current value of the object. The green zone is the first warning values, the yellow is the danger values.

I found two links by which you can customize TrackBar in C# visual studio. It is not the exact solution to your question but I believe if you play around with this u can find out what you want.
Code Project .com
ViBlend
Regards

WPF ProgressBar loses its glow when it updates too quickly - bug?

Ok, so I found some rather weird behaviour while messing around with the WPF ProgressBar control. This control is located in a column of a ListView control and the general situation differs little from this question & answer in its essence.
I bind Progressbar to a class by means of several properties (Min, Max, Value), all OneWay Bindings obviously. This other class is updated from another thread and regularly uses the INotifyPropertyChanged interface to let the ProgressBar know the status is progressing. And this all works just great!
But here is where it gets odd. My ProgressBar loses its glow.. right upto the moment it reaches the Max (=100%) value. Then it suddenly starts pulsing its white glowy stuff all over the green bar, and this is very annoying. I am showing progress with a reason, and the lack of a pulse is actually pretty distracting once you start to notice it not being there.
Thus, I set off to debug. I found that with Thread.Sleep(1000) in my threads processing, it still hid the glow, but if I bump it to Thread.Sleep(1500) the glow comes back at all times with a crazy vigour. After that, I tried translating my progress units to smaller numbers so the integer values would take longer to change. Min 0, Max 100 still has the lack of the glow. Min 0, Max 10 had the glow come back in its full vigor. In all cases, it is the same amount of work and time spent to reach 100%, but it is a very visible binary YES/NO effect with regards to the glow showing. The only thing I have not tested is whether it also happens when the ProgressBar is not placed inside of this ListView control.
I know myself well enough that I can't make sense of the deep WPF innards of the (XAML involved with the) ProgressBar control. So I was hoping anyone here knows whether this is a known bug, something they stumbled into, or something they might even know how to work around/fix.
My machine runs Windows 7, and I'm developing in VS2010 targeting .NET Framework 4 Client Profile.

I would take a guess and say that you lose the glow because you are updating your progress bar to often. Every time you set a new value the progress bar restarts its glowing animation (I think - I haven't tested this, I'm writing off the top of my head).
It seems that you have perhaps thought of the same thing and tried to work around it, but I'm not sure you have fully exhausted all possibilities:
Try creating a check that if (progressbar.Value == newValue) don't do progressbar.Value = newValue;
Progressbar should be using Decimals for Min, Max, Value. Make sure you don't do updates for every decimal point, eg. - 10,1; 10,2; 10,3; etc... (use progressbar.Value = (int)newValue;)
Try setting the progressbar value in bigger increments, instead of increment = 1, use increment = 10;
You could try taking a progressbar outside of ListView, maybe there is a rendering bug with progressbar being inside it.
PS! If you update your progressbar very rapidly, then it is OK for the glow animation not to run. Remember that the glow animiation's purpose is only to show that the application is still running (machine hasn't frozen), despite the fact that the progress(bar) hasn't moved.
If the progress is moving quickly, then that on its own is a visual effect for the user, so there is no need to have the glow animation at that moment...

XNA/C# Game Settings (Menu?)

It's my first time trying to make anything really interesting in C# and I was trying to make a simple form or game screen where the user could define a custom resolution/screen ratio etc. or to automatically detect the max screen size/ratio and output? its my first game, so I was wondering if it was possible or if there would be any major issues with such, rather than just setting it to 1366x768 (the resolution of all of my computers).
Thanks in advance for any assistance.

You could enumerate through the default GraphicAdapter's DisplayModeCollection property to find the DisplayMode with the max width/height/aspect ratio.
Something like:
GraphicsAdapter defaultAdapter = GraphicsAdapter.DefaultAdapter;
DisplayMode maxMode = defaultAdapter.DisplayModeCollection[0];
foreach (DisplayMode enumeratedDisplay in defaultAdapter.DisplayModeCollection)
{
//Test enumeratedDisplay against maxMode, setting maxMode to enumeratedDisplay if enumeratedDisplay is better
}
Maybe there's a better way, but that's certainly one way you could find the max.
Or, you could take the same DisplayModeCollection and populate a comboBox of sorts or a list, letting the user choose for themselves.
My apologies if the above code doesn't work in that exact form. I can't test it where I am currently

Just set the PreferredBackBuffer to 1366x768 and if the graphics device can handle that resolution you'll get it. otherwise you'll get something scaled down. the xbox will automatically scale if nescessary to support the television being used as well.

How do I create a colour that will match the current visual style?

For our winforms application, we've been asked to colour invalid cells in a DataGridView in a red colour. We need to find a red colour that matches the current visual style but which is still distinctive if the user has chosen a palette with mostly reds. How do I create a colour that will match the current visual style? How do I make sure I avoid clashes?

I don't think the original poster is looking to make a palette of colors (colours), instead he is trying to highlight an invalid cell. The chosen highlight color is red, but he is concerned that red might not stick out if the user has chosen a red palette.
How about this: When painting an invalid cell, use SystemColors.Window for the text and SystemColors.WindowText for the background. (or whatever equivalents there are for a DataGridView). This way, you are guaranteed that the invalid cell will be the opposite colors of a normal cell.

I think that you are looking at this the wrong way. Red is often chosen for several reasons. It is (in western culture among others) commonly used to depict that something is wrong or danger. But red is also a colour that usually stands out. However, when trying to direct a users attention to something on the page, there are two infallible methods.
1) Animated gifs or videos (annoying as f***) or
2) Clashing colours
Usually red stands out, but in your situation where a user may have a red themed style, your best bet is to go with a colour that will clash. It is possible to have clashing colours that go together (if that makes sense).
Here are a few websites that I have used in the past to help me find colour schemes that may help you as well:
Kuler, Color Combos and Color scheme designer
This may not have been the answer you were looking for but i hope it helps

The question is a bit ambiguous and a little subjective; it much easier to comment directly on examples. However, there are a multitude of on-line tools that will help you create colour palettes for websites, and these may be useful to gauge how a particular shade of red interacts with various other colours.
Hope this helps.

You could maybe try to use the Light and Dark methods of the ControlPaint class? I do something similar, although kind of in the opposite direction. I needed to make some rows in a grid stand out, but not stand out as much as the selected rows. So I created a color that was a bit lighter than the default selection color like this:
checkedColor = ControlPaint.Light(grid.DefaultCellStyle.SelectionBackColor, 1.65f);
Could try to use that, maybe with some added logic, and base it on some system color that is made to stand out. For example System.Drawing.SystemColors.HighLight or System.Drawing.SystemColors.HotTrack.

take a look at the Krypton Toolkit (http://www.componentfactory.com). They offer a free toolkit for WinForms controls with a theme manager. This theme manager provides ready to use methods to extract the current color values.
I have nothing to do with them. I use it for my own Product (Royal TS at http://www.code4ward.net) and found it really useful.
If you want to build beautiful UI, you should take a look at the Krypton stuff.