I'm creating a WPF 'Button' control and making it the child of my ElementHost control.
The background of the button is set to Red.
When I run my project, the button changes colour and it seems to loop through every couple of seconds going from Red to a light blue and back again.. until the Form loses focus.
If I hover over the button, it turns blue, then when I move off the button it starts this colour looping again.. my code is as simple as..
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
System.Windows.Controls.Button but = new System.Windows.Controls.Button();
but.Background = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Red;
elementHost1.Child = but;
}
}
Is this normal ? can I turn it off?
Yes, it's normal. WPF buttons always do a subtle color cycling effect when they have input focus, and that's the case for your button since it's the only control on the form. It's not very subtle in your example because Red is a long way from the other blueish color the button cycles through -- delete that Background assignment to see the effect as intended. Try adding another ElementHost with another WPF Button to the same form, and you'll see that only the focused button does the color cycling.
As for how to turn it off... I don't know but I'm afraid it's not easy. I don't see any simple property on Button that would change this effect. Such effects are generally achieved by WPF style templates which is a subject that makes grown men cry. You can find the MSDN overview below, but note that this assumes you're working within WPF and XAML, not within Windows Forms:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613570.aspx
My guess is that you would have to associate a changed Focused style with your button that won't do the color cycling, or else discover the resource name of the second brush (other than Background) that the Focused style cycles to, and set that resource to the same color as Background.
Related
I'm trying to place a transparent and borderless child (WinForm) form on top of another child (WinForm) form that is opaque, but I'd like to retain the ability to directly click on the transparent form. There are a few answers on the web regarding making a transparent form that can be clicked through, but I want to make one that I can click on.
I've found this answer, which shows that setting my transparent form's BackColor and TransparencyKey to something specific like Color.Red achieves the desired behavior. However based on this answer, it seems this behavior between certain Colors and TransparencyKey may actually be a long-running bug.
Ideally I don't want to rely on a bug to achieve a desired effect. What would be a more "appropriate" approach for making a clickable, transparent, and borderless (WinForm) form?
Update (Additional Context):
I'm basically creating a screen pixel previewer for color data extraction.
Overlay forms containing captured bitmap(s) of the screen area.
Another form that gives a visual indicator for the pixel area being previewed (small black box in the below snapshot). This form is placed above the bitmap forms. I have this form as transparent (to see through to the below bitmaps), but I still want to be able to click on it for event processing.
Without the TransparencyKey = BackColor = Color.Red trick, clicking within the small black box causes focus to move to the below bitmap form, which then covers up the small box form and the preview window showing the zoomed view. The purpose of the click is to capture the cursor position for additional processing. I can work around this by immediately giving focus back to the small box + preview forms, but that occasionally causes flicker.
I would like to reproduce a Control in my WindowsFormsApplication that is equal to the refresh Button of the Windows Network connection form.
Does anybody know which Control it is or how to build a equal one in C#? It seems to be a PictureBox but if you hover it with the Cursor it gets a semi transparent blue colored overlay.
you can use XanderUI for this, add the button, change the button image and change both hover and click background colors to whatever color you like
I know that label can't receive focus, it doesn't seem to be responsive to tab switching. But all I need is perform some action when user uses tab consequently on a form which has only labels. For example, each label has an associated textbox but this textbox is hidden when the label is visible and vice-versa. What I want is allowing user to use tab to switch between the hidden textboxes on the form, normally, all the textboxes are hidden while all the labels are shown, the labels are supposed to be focusable so that when using tab, it can know that (as some event) to show the associated textbox and hide itself, when switching to another label, the current label whose the associated textbox is shown will become visible again and its associated textbox will become hidden.
I have to implement this kind of 2 in 1 control (textbox and label in a composited control) because I just want to show only the text (no border and background) as if the textbox has a transparent background and only show the textbox (and hide the label) when user need to edit (start by clicking on the field or using tab). This should have been easier for me if there was a transparent background textbox but there isn't a decent one in the world of windows forms. Please notice that I also know of the alpha blend transparent textbox presented in an article in codeproject but it can't meet my need because the text is rendered wrong with ugly border around the text path (some kind of missing antialiasing but it's even worse than that).
I'm really pity if this mechanism can't be implemented, the forms look better when all the fields seem to show info only but a click or tab switch can let user jump in edit mode.
I hope there is some solution out there. Thank you in advance.
I found this solution by a whim in my mind. I didn't think there was such a solution but it does help solve my problem (and I'm sure many others will benefit from it). Simply I have to create my own Label inheriting UserControl. I didn't thought of UserControl before and it is very helpful. Focusability, transparent background, borderlessness are all which can be done easily to a UserControl. The only custom feature I have to do myself is rendering the text which is also very simple and there are many ways to do. I just add a Label to the UserControl and set Label's Dock to DockStyle.Fill, adjust the height of the UserControl properly and that's all.
Thank God helping me think of UserControl before trying any other complicated solution such as listening to TAB and SHIFT + TAB keypress events.
I was wondering if I could draw the background of a tabpage in C# transparent like so I can see behind the window itself. I though it would give a cool effect but I don't know if or how I can do it.
You can set the Appearance property of TabControl to Buttons Instead of using BackColor property. That would bring transparent tab page look and cool effect.
VB & C# syntax
TabPage1.BackColor = Color.Transparent
this will show the tabpage1 color as the form color.
I have a winforms C# application that opens multiple dialog boxes. To suit the style of the application, I have removed the default title bars for each window and created my own (with control buttons and drag-to-move function).
The problem that now faces me is that without a titlebar, the user has no way of telling which window is the 'active' window when they are manually moved apart (so they are not overlapping).
In any windows application (that uses titlebars), when you try to navigate away from a dialog box back to the main program (without closing the dialog box) - it wont let you. The border of the dialog box flashes and you hear a windows error sound. Some kind of equivalent visual feedback would be great without needing to have the default titlebars - and tinting an entire window darker seems like it would do the trick nicely.
Something like this in pseudo-code, which would nicely tint the parent window whilst a dialog is open:
// tint window now
window.ShowDialog();
// un-tint window
I have tried to place a panel covering everything with colour set to 'transparent' (with the intention of later controlling the opacity of the panel) but the transparency does not seem to work. Any other ideas of accomplishing this? Or does anyone have a better suggestion to achieve the same level of visual feedback?
Summary:
Is there any way to tint an entire window, or overlay it with a colour? If not, could anyone suggest an alternate method of making the window appear 'inactive'?
I would suggest you to create a method in forms you want to disable:
void DisableForm()
{
//some fancy color
this.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Khaki;
//and disable all controls owned by form, just to be sure
foreach (var s in this.Controls)
{
((Control)s).Enabled = false;
}
}
and functions which enables back those forms of course.
edit.
also you can set visibility property of controls to false