I'm a fairly new programmer; semi-seasoned. But I still need a lot of learning. So I've focused on a few languages. C# is the big one.
Now I know Visual Studio lets you simply pull a button straight out of the toolbox. You now have a control; that manipulates that object.
I'd like to get really deep into programming a button for instance. Create my own custom buttons; Where I can draw the shape, size, gradients, hover effects, glass effects, drop-downs, really get into the nuts and bolts to create these reusable, dynamic, decorative controls.
What is the best starting point? Any advice seasoned developers could share with me?
Add a xaml "UserControl" to your project and make the WPF content of what you wanna render on the control in "Template" property. Then you should use some Binding expression to load content and handle events. It's so simple to do that and make whatever custom thing you need in WPF. There is no need to do paint things like .NET 2.
Cheers
Related
Let's say I have two "views". Each view has it's own button, which makes other view to appear. All should be managed in one window. So how do I achieve this? Im looking for something like viewController in iOS...
I tried to use one filled, docked panel - but than all classes are active, so it doesn't seem like a good solution. I also tried user classes (like this), it works, but it's complicated and I have big deal sending data between these classes.
There is no such thing as "views" of a form. The concept of what a UIViewController can do in iOS is different than building a properly functioning form in C#. You need to learn some new skills now and approach this from a different perspective.
The basic principle is to build a form with controls (either manually or through code or both), change the properties of those controls manually or through code and use the methods they support. You can do what you want, but it's going to take learning some new things.
Try checking this out:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/360kwx3z(v=vs.90).aspx
It's not 100% clear what you are trying to do, but it sounds like you should look into User Controls or Composite Controls.
During an interview, the company was asking about my use of custom controls in WPF. I have found with all of the power of the WPF way of creating a control (datatemplate, control template, styles,triggers etc... ) that having to write a custom control that overrides the OnRender method really hasn't been necessary. Later found out that most of their development has been in Winforms.
If coming at a control from a 100% WPF direction, how often is it necessary to write a customcontrol with OnRender overrides? The Winform approach is really not making use of the WPF composition technique of creating controls and it seemed like a question not based on much WPF knowledge.
Thanks
Harold
Good question (though a bit opinion-based) and no answers? Fixing.
If you are winforms-experienced developer, then thinking winform-way is still acceptable in wpf. For a while. This is where you may find self making mostly custom controls (containing xaml and code, or even without xaml). But the more you learn, the less you need that. Many many tasks can be completed in wpf simply because it is very flexibly. Every entity consist of something what can be customized: templates, styles, converters, behaviors or even plain event handling.
You can start with custom control and then find out what you don't really need it (or it can be downgraded to simple restyling).
When I started making first serious wpf project, there were 3 custom controls and they are still. Here is why.
Outlined TextBlock. Simply because you need custom OnRender (to build and draw geometry for outline).
Animated content. To apply transition animation when changing content. I could almost make it without custom control, but there is a problem - calculating animations logic when transitioning left-to-right, right-to-left, up-down or down-up. It's waaaay easy to have in one custom control. But possible with UserControl and view, not as pretty still.
Graph. Simply because it's too complicated to be presented with Visual and because of performance using gdi+ gives millions of points (hundered thousands figures) to be drawn within ms.
Conclusion: it's good and useful, though way less than it was in winforms (where you simply had no other option).
I want to make a custom control with the Windows 8 API in C# so that it will run on an RT app distributed through the store.
I looked through what I can add to a project and found Templated Control and User Control. Both allow me to organize other controls and some logic into a new control for reusability.
But this isn't what I want. I want to be able to custom paint and create controls. I would be shocked if they removed this but am honestly uncertain if I can. I'm basically looking for what class to inherit from and what method / event to override to let me draw the control myself.
I found a way to use the Templated Control option that I wasn't aware of before. Essentially my custom control has a canvas that I 'paint' with objects (lines, images, etc.) by adding them as children and manipulating them in events.
This tutorial helped me figure out what I was doing.
I've seen other people say they created a rectangle and painted it with a special Brush, either a ImageBrush (where they drew an image in the background) or a DrawingBrush.
Hopefully one of these two approaches can help anyone looking for the same thing I was.
EDIT:
So, I ended up making my own basic solution to this problem, and it can be found in my own answer to the question below. Or, here's a link.
Original Post
I'm doing some UI programming for a small .NET application. The application has some collections of items that need to be displayed in a grid sort of format (X columns by Y rows) and the grid elements need to be able to get dragged around to different grid locations, and possibly out of the grid all together.
The most comparable sort of UI design elements I can think of are the jQueryUI Draggables.
Do I have to roll my own or are there components people have already written to act like this? Even better, are there any free components? Or is there an easy way to do this that I just don't know about (don't do a lot of .NET UI programming..)
Also these "grid items" need to be able to include windows form components. The DataRepeater control is close to what I need, except it only supports horizontal or vertical alignments, not grids of items.
Here's a visual example of what I'm looking for:
I tried to stick with a halloween theme here.
Well I rolled my own solution and hosted it on GoogleCode:
draggableitemorderedpanel- A .NET Winforms Component... Kinda like jQuery UI Draggables (not really, maybe someday)
here's a screenshot:
(source: googlecode.com)
and another just resized:
(source: googlecode.com)
Hope this helps someone else out. Also it's super basic and pretty sucks right now but gets the job done.
Anyone that wants project access can have it.
The System.Windows.Forms.TableLayoutPanel control supports dragging and dropping, you just have to handle the right events. You could make your own "GridItem" user control, with the icon, caption, background color, etc displayed on a Panel, and then plop a bunch of them in the tablelayoutpanel, and wire up some event handlers. Here's something similar:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Vsexpressvcs/thread/1cade626-b76d-40c5-9e5a-101cf2a5e412
I am trying to create a panel which will have a set of "buttons" on it.
These buttons should have the following behaviour:
Appear similar to a tag (with
rounded edges)
Contain a red
cross to remove the filter/tag from
the panel, similar to the way internet
explorer tabs have an embedded cross to close the individual tab.
allow the user to click
on the tag and respond like a normal
button (as long as the click is not
in the red cross)
Number 1 is no problem, this is just appearance, however, regarding numbers 2 and 3, I am not sure if there is already code out there do to something similar...and I dont really want to reinvent the wheel if I can avoid it!
My question is: Does anyone know if there is something out there in infragistics which will do this simply, or will I need to write this myself by subclassing winform buttons?
Thanks in advance!
Is this new development or maintenance of an existing project?
If it is maintenance, you have a somewhat tougher time ahead. You'll implement a UserControl, probably segmented into two buttons. Use docking to get the behavior as correct as possible. The far right button would contain your cross image; the left (which would need to auto-expand as you resize the control) would contain your primary button behavior. Play with the visual styles until you get them right (EG, removing borders, etc).
If this is new development, and you haven't gotten too far into it, you might consider using Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) instead of WinForms. It will be easier to build the control and get it to look exactly how you want it. WPF includes an extremely powerful control compositing system which allows you to layer multiple controls on top of each other and have them work exactly as you'd expect, and it carries the added advantage of allowing full visual control out-of-the-box.
Either way, this is more work than dropping in an external component ... I've used Infragistics for years, and I can't think of anything they have which is comparable. The closest, but only if you're building an MDI application and these controls are for window navigation, is the Tabbed MDI window management tools -- and there, only the tabs (which replace window title bars) have this behavior.
I don't think that infragistics can do something like this. The UltraButton control can't.
Implementing a own control wouldn't be that hard.
your probably going to have to make a costume control for this type of work.