I am developing an application that wraps Lua to enable interactivity with geometric shapes and their properties and I am about to finish but... in the main window, I have a flowlayout panel that should show the properties for said shape, as how Lua dictates.
Here comes problem/question as I don't think clearing the panel and re-adding the controls that represent each property, each time I have to update the properties is a good idea nor the most effective solution, is there something I can do to enhance this?
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I have just started getting into learning WPF, and to add controls to the window I just move them from the toolbox and onto the window. Then I can continue moving them to put them in the places I want. Now I have got into layouts/panels, stack panels, canvas,dock panels etc and I am struggling to understand why they are useful if you can just drag and move objects/controls on the screen yourself.
For example dock panels, using the dock property you can put the object on the left,right,bottom,top,lastchildfill. You can dock a textbox to the left by using the property, DockPanel.Dock = "Left", but why can't I just move it there myself?
First off, don't even waste time drag/dropping controls into a WPF app. By placing controls in this manner, you are severely limiting your design potential in WPF. Most serious WPF designers don't even bother dragging controls, they hand type all of the XAML. Arguably, this is how WPF was designed. Leveraging XAML allows your layouts to be totally dynamic in ways that WinForms could never dream of, but you have to hand code the XAML.
Do you see where this is going? Don't drag/drop controls when designing WPF apps! Every conference I've been to stresses this fact! Grid panels are a huge part of WPF layouts, and are crucial to getting your controls to end up where you expect.
The hardest part about learning WPF is figuring out it is not WinForms with nice graphics. It is a totally different beast, with a steep learning curve! Hand coding XAML is extremely tedious at first, but once you learn the names of all the controls and the important properties, you'll be cranking out UIs way faster than the old drag/drop method.
You can move the controls manually, but different layout panels can automatically handle controls positioning when You add new controls or when the window is resized.
Please take a look at description on MSDN and on CodeProject that describes different types of containers.
I am working on a Win8 app destined for the Windows Store. Hurdles I am trying to overcome is how to deal with the different ways an app can be displayed.
Currently, my main pages is a LayoutAwarePage so it has logic to handle different visual states. However, my question is more how to make my page render differently depending on its state.
I thought, initially, that you basically created a layout for each state that the application supports. But it seems like the VisualStateManager portion of the XAML is just an area where you make piecemeal modifications to the design (hide an element, change an alignment).
I am working with a grid that has many columns and rows to organize my controls and it looks great in fullscreen. However, this doesn't work at all in the snapped state, as most of my controls become hidden off screen. I could certainly add a ScrollViewer control, but this is basically a hack and a usability nightmare for a user.
Thanks for any insight!
It might be that your app doesn't lend itself to snapped view. You are allowed to simply display a message / image that states this. Alternatively, consider just showing the columns that are most important.
The standard MS way seems to be to replace horizontal oriented controls with vertical ones - maybe a listview or something would look better. You'll probably find your code easier to read if you have one control for snapped and another for full screen.
Not exactly related to your question, but Blend works very well with XAML to allow you to manipulate the grid or show the relevant control.
Here is a very good guide from Jerry Nixon.
http://blog.jerrynixon.com/2012/12/walkthrough-implementing-snapview-in.html
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.
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.
I'm writing an application that is basically just a preferences dialog, much like the tree-view preferences dialog that Visual Studio itself uses. The function of the application is simply a pass-through for data from a serial device to a file. It performs many, many transformations on the data before writing it to the file, so the GUI for the application is simply all the settings that dictate what those transformations should be.
What's the best way to go about designing/coding a tree-view preferences dialog? The way I've been going about it is building the main window with a docked tree control on the left. Then I have been creating container controls that correspond to each node of the tree. When a node is selected, the app brings that node's corresponding container control to the front, moves it to the right position, and maximizes it in the main window. This seems really, really clunky while designing it. It basically means I have tons of container controls beyond the edge of the main window during design time that I have to keep scrolling the main window over to in order to work with them. I don't know if this totally makes sense the way I'm writing this, but maybe this visual for what I'm talking about will make more sense:
Basically I have to work with this huge form, with container controls all over the place, and then do a bunch of run-time reformatting to make it all work. This seems like a lot of extra work. Am I doing this in a totally stupid way? Is there some "obvious" easier way of doing this that I'm missing?
A tidier way is to create separate forms for each 'pane' and, in each form constructor, set
this.TopLevel = false;
this.FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle.None;
this.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
That way, each of these forms can be laid out in its own designer, instantiated one or more times at runtime, and added to the empty area like a normal control.
Perhaps the main form could use a SplitContainer with a static TreeView in one panel, and space to add these forms in the other. Once they are added, they could be flipped through using Hide/Show or BringToFront/SendToBack methods.
SeparateForm f = new SeparateForm();
MainFormSplitContainer.Panel2.Controls.Add(f);
f.Show();
Greg Hurlman wrote:
Why not just show/hide the proper container when a node is selected in the grid? Have the containers all sized appropriately in the same spot, and hide all but the default, which would be preselected in the grid on load.
Unfortunately, that's what I'm trying to avoid. I'm looking for an easy way to handle the interface during design time, with minimal reformatting code needed to get it working during run time.
I like Duncan's answer because it means the design of each node's interface can be kept completely separate. This means I don't get overlap on the snapping guidelines and other design time advantages.
I would probably create several panel classes based on a base class inheriting CustomControl. These controls would then have methods like Save/Load and stuff like that. If so I can design each of these panels separately.
I have used a Wizard control that in design mode, handled several pages, so that one could click next in the designer and design all the pages at once through the designer. Though this had several disadvantages when connecting code to the controls, it probably means that you could have a similar setup by building some designer classes. I have never myself written any designer classes in VS, so I can't say how to or if its worth it :-)
I'm a little curious of how you intend to handle the load/save of values to/from the controls? There must be a lot of code in one class if all your pages are in one big Form?
And yet another way would of course be to generate the gui code as each page is requested, using info about what type of settings there are.