I wrote my first C# program a while ago. It got somewhat big. My .settings file has over 20 different parameters - booleans, sizes, strings, ints. I'd like to provide users with a GUI to change them during runtime instead of editing the app.exe.config file which is somewhat advanced and confusing.
I'm very inexperienced with C# but seems like there should be a better way than for me to manually create a form, drag in labels, inputs, checkboxes, radio buttons, and manually handle all gui events and what happens when values get changed and whatnot. Building this gui by hand seems like a lot of work.
How do you guys handle the settings of a C# app? Can't I generate something from the XML?
In WinForms applications you can add a control to a Form and then click the (PropertyBinding) under (ApplicationSettings) in the Property box.
The dialog allows you to bind properties of the control to a parameter in the config file. It is an extra step during design but it must be done.
These settings will end up in the user config file (I strongly advise against the application config file for this)
You will have to provide the user with a way to specify these settings by either:
having the user edit the config file - very dangerous because it is very easy to mess that up.
allowing the user to manipulate the UI (drag-drop) and save the settings from code. - a lot of work to prevent the user painting himself in a corner.
a separate/standalone designer application that combines 1. and 2.
In WPF you can use DataGrid or ListView for your task. However, if you are inexperienced with C# or WPF, it is maybe faster to do the settings form by hand.
Related
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.
I have a silverlight application with several menu buttons, each of which opens up a user control in a center "work space" area. It works fine. Now what I'd like to do is make some more user controls, compile them into a dll, and through say, a configuration file, have the silverlight app add a new menu button and make it make one of those new controls appear. The difficult part is, I'd like to be able to do this without recompiling the silverlight app. I'd like another developer to be able to make a user control that does some things, compile it into a dll, and drop it into the silverlight directory with some changes to a config file to get the main app to load it in. Is there a way I could do this?
Since noone else has replied yet:
What you want to do is reflect classes form a third-party dll at runtime. This is possibly too big a subject for SO, and all I can really recommend is looking up examples of it, and maybe the msdn section on it.
You'll also want to look up serialization and deserialization in C# and silverlight (this question might be a good start).
Sorry I can't be more help than that, but hopefully someone more experienced will weigh in with a useful article or some such.
Good luck :)
I am trying to reproduce a window from the Microsoft built-in Registry Editor. The window is the one which is opened when you select "Modify Binary Data..." from the context-menu when a value is clicked.
The goal is to make an identical(!) window in my .NET C# application using Windows Forms.
The problem is the textBox displayed in the window which contains the binary data. I have tried using a RichTextBox, but it isn't as simple as it seems to be especially when it comes to editing data and the behaviour of this textBox.
So I have 2 questions:
How to achieve an identical textBox in C# using Windows Forms? Maybe you know some other ways to reproduce this textBox?
I also need the font name used in this textBox, I couldn't find it :)
Thanks!
I can think of two ways you can approach this. The first is a DataGrid, painstakingly styled to have transparent grid lines and exact margins between columns, with filters to enforce hex digits only. All this, set alongside a richtextbox for the ASCII display, with your code synchronizing the selection between them.
Alternately, you can replace the DataGrid with a collection of TextBoxes, again styled for invisible borders, automatically adding new textboxes to the collection when the user adds more data.
All in all, it seems like an awful lot of work, especially in WinForms - WPF might make this a bit easier, especially the styling, but still a lot of work.
Regarding the name of that control - I tried using Spy++ to sniff it out, and it seems it's registered as a Window Class named "HEX", but I'm not sure that will really get you somewhere:
Here is an open source project containing a hex editor control for Winforms, looking at least very similar:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hexbox/
I guess you can modify it accordingly to your requirements. But beware, the source code for the control is ~6000 lines of code (including more than a dozen utility classes). It inherits directly from "Control" and does all the text display using GDI+ (so no modified DataGrid or RichTextBox).
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.
i want to show the folder contents in my windows form from where user can copy paste the files user needed, what type of container i have to use for this purpose?
Basically you have two options. You can get an already build control and use it in your application, there are lots of them but not very good and you'll have to pay for one.
Or you could use a TreeView / ListView and build your own control that will suite best what you need. Here is an example explained and with source code.
Another alternative is you can get the Windows API Code Pack which contains a managed wrapper for the actual explorer shell control which basically allows you to embed explorer directly in your application.
before i used Ultra win tree(infrajestics control) to view all files with in the tree view.
Consider using the FolderView and FileView controls from Shell MegaPack.
Assuming :
the design requirements prohibit showing the actual location of the files the end-user can copy or paste. Assume all file names shown are stripped of their path locations.
the list of files is "flat" (no treeview type display is needed)
there's a need to move, or copy, one or more files from an original "complete" list to another "partial list"
I'd create an interface with two ListViews in a Panel : one column per ListView wide enough to display file names : allow multi-select in both of them.
I'd either implement drag-and-drop using standard techniques, or, more likely, I'd create a set of buttons with arrows to move items back and forth between the ListViews. I might have seperate delete buttons for each ListView and require the end-user to confirm deletion depending on the application.
If "multiple copies" (more than one list entry with identical content) are allowed I would probably use some keyboard options to control this, particularly if I were drag/dropping.
Depending on the application, I'd think about letting the end-user make "snapshots" of the current state of the two ListViews, which could then be "restored" : while a simple "Cancel" button could take care of the case where you want to reset the whole thing.