I have a form, originally developed to be used on XP, containing a .NET 4.0 ProgressBar control. It's part of a composite control, where I write some info on top of the bar using TextRenderer. (I didn't go for a label, because the transparency doesn't seem to work.)
I've now upgraded the OS to Windows 7, and it seems the whole look and feel of the controls has changed. The progressbar now has a kind of "swoosh" effect, a highlight that moves quickly from left to right. The problem is this animation is removing my rendered text. My app happens to update often, so the result is a blinking text on top of my status bar.
How can I fix this?
Any reason you have to write the text superimposed on the bar itself instead of underneath it, as everything else does? It sounds like it would be a lot easier to read the text if it were separate from the bar. That's certainly been my experience of progress bars as a user: keep any status messages away from the graphics.
EDIT: I've just checked, and if you don't call Application.EnableVisualStyles it uses the very old "big blue blocks" style, as far as I can tell. Personally I find this pretty ugly - I'd recommend that you stick with the nicer visual style, but move the text.
If you want to go all the way, you can remove calls to the Application.EnableVisualStyles method, which enables "colors, fonts, and other visual elements that form an operating system theme."
Visual Studio typically adds a call to this method in the Main method of a WinForms application.
Related
I've set my XNA game's DeviceWindowHandle to a PictureBox with Dock set to Fill on a Form, effectively providing the powerful array of .NET controls to my game. I'm aware this comes with a handful of niggly things to clean up, one of which is my problem explained below.
I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to avoid the WM pump pausing when doing things like clicking to drag a ScrollBar control, or right clicking in a TextBox control, this ultimately causes my renderSurface (the dock filled pictureBox) to stop being drawn to temporarily. Information on this seems sparse, though it's likely i'm not looking in the right places.
I could tie in some custom drawn XNA ScrollBars and set ShortcutsEnabled on the .NET TextBox's to false, but i would rather fix the root of this problem if possible.
Thanks in advance.
XNA works by having a game loop. WinForms and native c++ Windows GUI apps work by having a message pump. Sounds like you have fused the two somehow.
Perhaps you need to call the base Game.Update() somehow from within your forms's Control.WndProc
I'm having a persistent problem with my VS2010. After working for a while, the display will start to glitch out. The code all shows as black-on-black (I use a dark background because it's easier on the eyes, but even when I switched to the default, it just makes the text white-on-white instead.) All tooltip hovers appear in the upper-left corner of the screen instead of where they're supposed to. If you select text, the code that gets selected is nowhere near where you clicked the mouse. (Not that you can read the text anyhow since it's the same color as the background.) And none of the dockable panels will appear or if they do they're all glitched out as well. The only solution seems to be closing the program and restarting it. I've been using this copy of VS2010 for years without issue, and my other projects don't seem to have any problems. This one is C#, uses a lot of Windows Forms (not WPF), has some customized Controls, but otherwise isn't all that unusual. I have the following extensions:
CodeMaid
CSharpIntellisensePresenter
InheritanceMargin
ProductivityPowerTools
Tunnel Vision Labs Output Window Services
WatermarkTextBox Control
Some of these are recently installed so they may be the culprits. Has anyone had any display problems with any of these extensions? I can live without most of them, but I'm not sure if it'll make a difference. There's no easy way to test it either, as the glitch only shows up every couple of hours or so.
I would like to create a GUI where the main panel expands him self only to the space available, and then if some of the tools 1 or 2 are activated they appear at the top right side and if other tool is started it would automatically displays below ht visible ones or at top of none is displayed...
And if possible the append function.
I think its possible to do this with a bunch of if statements to re-size the panels everytime something would change the window content but there must be an easy way to do this.
Is something similar to the workflow of visual Studio...
Right now im using Windows Forms but i think its possible to switch to WPF
So what I'm looking for is for tutorials,sites,guides or simple a call to pay attention to some options inside the visual studio himself to help me create what I'm trying to achieve.
Here is a mock up to a better understanding
http://i.stack.imgur.com/0vupi.jpg
P.S the only thing I managed to do is hide and make visible the tool panels, but the space is always occupied in blank, and they appear no at top or bottom but the place where i drop them even if i dock them.
If you're open to third party controls, Telerik makes a fantastic dock control that does exactly what you're looking for.
Another option would be Digital Rune Docking or Windows, which is free for non-commercial use.
Our clients have fat fingers, and so do we. We take touchscreen netbooks apart to insert them into our custom hardware, and I write a software interface that shows up on the touchscreen. The problem is that it has about a 3/4" bezel over the screen, which means hitting that little red "X" becomes a challenge, especially considering reduced capacitive ability on the edges and corners.
Is there a way to make this standard close button larger? Of course in the application I can always make really nice 80x80 buttons that are perfectly usable, but there seems to be no way to override the default frame of the form. We have tried enabling Large Fonts and all the built-in accessibility features, but nothing seems to make it large enough to hit successfully.
Simply adding a toolbar button is also not much of an option. We prefer to utilize the standard look and feel of a normal Windows application.
Alternatively, should we be looking at making some sort of "kiosk mode" where we simply go fullscreen and do nothing involving the taskbar or title bar? How difficult is this to accomplish, if so?
Well, since you're setting up the hardware, I presume you're able to configure preinstalled software, including Windows. Can't you just go into Display Settings and make the title bar larger, so that the close button grows accordingly?
See MS Article about distributing windows themes: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310514
Getting a large close button is fairly easy to do. It is hidden well since Vista, in Win7 it is Control Panel + Personalization + Window Color, Advanced appearance settings, Item = Caption buttons, change the Size. You probably won't like this much though, you'll get a rather large caption bar, lots of waste screen real estate.
Tackling this from the other end: your request is unusual. Most anybody that sets up a touch screen app wants to know how to prevent the user from closing the window. Windows Forms makes it too easy to design a bunch of forms and switch between them. That isn't much of a user interface on a regular desktop, especially not here. You can design your forms as user controls as well and switch them in and out of the main window as the user navigates through the UI. Not unlike, say, Microsoft Outlook. You can even turn your existing form into a control. Set its TopLevel property to False, FormBorderStyle to None, Visible to true.
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.