Is there a way to display the projects settings in a form inside the application?
I have added a Menu Item called setting, Now when that is clicked I want a small form to popuo with the applications setings.
Is there a quick way to do this that just displays the settings as you would see them in Visual Studio? Or do I have to manually fetch the settings and display them?
If I need to manually do it. Which type of form must I use so that it will appear inside my main form?
I think you'll manually need to collect them and display them. To display on an area inside your main form you'll want to use a UserControl and place your created UserControl on your main form.
Take a look at PropertyGrid control. It's the one what VS uses itself to edit properties of things (aka settings). Displaying things is pretty easy: add PropertyGrid to a form and assign object to it propertyGrid.SelectedObject. You will be able to see and edit properties of that object (in case of configuration settings this will be a configuration class instance I assume) almost right away! Tuning, adding localization, etc are not trivial tasks, but there are plenty of tutorials.
Otherwise, you could possibly use TableLayoutPanel with 2 columns: labels and respective texboxes (or other edit controls, to example, NumbericUpDown for int values), rows are autosized. But then you will have to add label and textbox for each setting yourself, as well as write some code to implement getting/setting of each configuration setting.
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I am doing my first steps programming a little toolbox in C#.
I want to choose the program to run via a menustrip.
How can I switch all visible textboxes, buttons etc. on the same form? I don't want to open a new form. Do I have to show/hide every element "by hand" or is there a better solution?
I hope you get my problem.
Thanks in advance.
Yes totally understood.
You need a way to navigate between different fragments within your application.
Since these are your first steps and not a legacy app, why aren't you starting with WPF which is the successor of Winforms ? (newer better)
See how can you achieve such functionally in WPF
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/app-development/navigation-overview?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8
Although the terms are similar and also apply in winforms.
What you want to do is to create all the buttons etc as part of a UserControl. You can then add your custom UserControl to the form. This should allow you to switch the user control for some other control, or change the visibility for the whole user control.
This can also allow you to place multiple user controls side by side or in some other layout.
I'm just curious if there is an easy way to set a WinForm property like Autosize (for example) to true for every form in a project without having to manually change every single one of them. Thanks!
Create a Form called BaseForm and let all other forms inherit from it. On the BaseForm you can set the desired font, scaling etc. and all other forms will inherit these properties. This is the first thing I do in every Windows Forms project I fire up.
You may also consider creating a BaseDialog, inheriting from BaseForm. This BaseDialog can have hidden minimize/maximize buttons etc. that you would like to be common for all modal dialogs in your application.
I'm unsure from your question whether this will meet your needs but the Application.OpenForms property allows you to enumerate all open Form instances: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.application.openforms(v=vs.90).aspx
Anyone come up with a way that I can design a panel without a form?
On the surface usercontrol doesn't seem the way to go.
Background:
I come from a text editor world and VS is new to me. We did everything with panels instead of forms. So open for learning. Specifically have a base class panel (ExtendedPanel) that defines some basic controls: Cancel, Save, Save and Close. This ExtendedPanel then will be used for ClientExtendedPanel that is tied to a bindingsouce clientBindingSource. This is all tied to my entity framework model. So I will add, edit and delete sql datarows for my Client table. If no changes have happened by Save button will not be enabled. If I make a change but hit cancel it will warn me. I've done all this before but since I left that company I don't have access to the code base and they didn't use VS (text editor only)so it wasn't really transportable anyway.
All that background so I can ask: Is usercontrol the way to go, or is there something that will allow me to visually add controls to a panel like it is a form?
Yes, a UserControl provides a form-like canvas in the designer for you to add other controls (buttons, etc).
You can do this too by inheriting a panel and writing the code to add the buttons and wire their events, etc, but you won't get the designer support.
In my Windows Forms applications I often put the controls' text data (form title, labels texts, button captions, etc.) into a .settings (feature automatically generated by Visual Studio - based on the ApplicationSettingsBase class). In particular,
Add a form or a control.
In Solution Explorer add a new string item into the application scope of the settings file.
Bind the control text property with the corresponding item of the settings file (through the property binding).
The good point of this is that all my text data is collected in one place and is easy to check and edit. Also it is convenient when I want to use the same text for several controls.
However, I haven't heard that somebody uses the .settings such way. In tutorials for creating multilingual applications, for example, it is recommended to enter texts directly into the control property.
So, is it good practice to use .settings for storing controls text data?
Brief conclusion from the answers:
Storing controls text data in the .settings is not common practice.
Use the settings to remember things for the user, like window size, location, state (minimized, maximized, normal), currently selectedItem of comboboxes, checked state of checkboxes, etc. Things that can be bound and automatically reset for the user the next time he/she runs the program.
Button text belong in resource files to simplify localization if needed.
This kind of data belongs in the application's resource file(s). That way they can be localized.
User Controls -- Do they serve a special purpose?
As far as I can tell they are no different to forms - they have the same toolbox and features.
Are there certain times when they are appropriate to use over forms?
It would be interesting to understand what they are good for.
You use them to group a set of controls and behaviors together in a re-usable way. You can't show a control on the screen unless it's added to a form somewhere.
One good example is a textbox. It's very common to have a label next to your textboxes. You can build a user control to make this easier. Just drop a label and a textbox on the control, expose whatever your properties you want, setup the new control in your toolbox, and now you can just drop this control on your form instead of needing to arrange a label and a toolbox on the form separately.
You could kind of think of them as a panel which "remembers" what controls you put on it. And there's one more important piece. You can put code in these controls as well, and use that to also build special behaviors into your custom controls.
I have to disagree (slightly) with the selected answer. Reusability is only part of what a UserControl is for.
All Controls are reusable. Almost all controls are reusable on the same Form/Window/Panel/etc. For example, a TextBox is a control.
There are two ways to create your own reusable control:
Custom Control
Completely custom, and reusable.
Created entirely in code.
You get a bit more granular control over what your control is doing this way.
Lighter weight (usually), because there isn't anything added in for designability within Visual Studio.
In ASP.Net only: No "HTML" type file to use or edit.
User Control
Completely custom, and reusable.
Created partially in a designer in Visual Studio, and partially in code. (via code behind)
Much easier to deal with from a visual aspect.
A little heavier, as there is pre-existing code added in by the framework to support designing inside Visual Studio.
In ASP.Net only: You can change the appearance a bit simply by editing the .ascx file (basically HTML).
User Controls serve the purpose of reusing controls.
Imagine you need a search box in several pages of your application. You can create a search user control and drop it in every page where you want it visible.
So, it's nothing more than a container that aggregates reusable blocks for your pages.
Forms have a lot of extra furniture that you don't need if you simply want a collection of controls together - the minimize and maximize buttons for example. If you just simply grouped your controls in a Panel, you'd have all the event handlers on the same form as the panel - with a user control, the event handling code is in the user control class, not the form class.
You can reuse the same control on many forms. In fact all items you are using while creating windows forms are the controls. User controls are just extra controls extending controls library provided by .NET.
In ASP.NET, user controls enable you to split your page into reusable components. For example, you may want to have a search box which can be used in different places on your website, so you'd use a user control. They can also be used for partial page caching. You can cache portions of your page to improve performance.