In C# WinForms I'd like to make a UserControl that mimics the look of a ToolWindow -- sizable, with room for a caption and a close button at the top right. This seems possible through overriding CreateParams(), using the relevant constants from WinUser.h, and adding custom handlers for the appropriate mouse events, but it seems like a lot of trouble for something that simple. Before I go to it, is there an easier way?
Really rather the easiest way is to just use a Form with FormBorderStyle = SizeableToolWindow. That's what it was made for. Display it with the Show(owner) overload so it is always on top of your main window. If you want to salvage the UserControl then just Dock = Fill in the form. Albeit that exposing its properties get harder to do cleanly.
Check out Weifenluo's DockPanel Suite for a windowing model that resembles Visual Studio's.
ToolWindow is a window, UserControl is a control that sits INSIDE a window (like a text box, button, etc.). If you want to have a UserControl that is sizable and has a caption and a close button, I think you'll have to create a caption bar and close button and size grips as parts of the control itself.
You'd need to remove the control from its parent on "close", and resize the control in its parent on "resizing" with size grips.
Related
let's say I want to make program settings menu like:
Many tab options that change the layout of the rest of the window
My program is in C# and I'm making it in Visual Studio
I tried to do it 2 ways:
Make the window super large with all possible layouts in the Form designer and then just resizing it to fit one of them at the time but this method works for like 4 tabs when you can fit them all at 1 screen. If it's large you have to work with slide bars and that's really impractical, laggy and for many tabs you even have to search them
Not using Form designer at all and hand write all the declarations, positions, sizes, colors etc. But like this it takes pretty a while even just to set up 1 button and there is no way I can fast see how it looks like
So the question is: Is there a magic way I don't know about to do this? And how is this made professionally?
Simple solution for small number of views
You can use a TextBox and ListView docked in a Panel docked left.
And a ControlTab docked fill in a panel named for example PanelMain docked fill at right with visible at false.
You will create any tabpage as option. In each tabpage you will put a panel docked fill and dedicated content in. On the listview item click event or itemchange, you will set the tabpage panel parent to PanelMain.
The little problem can be about spacing and the code file can be large (regions can be used).
Advanced solution more clean for several views
You can use the standard multipage pattern with one form per option/view, and do the same thing as exposed previously.
You create one form per view and put a panel docked fill embedding controls.
When the user click on the menu, you set the form main panel parent to the option form or the main panel of the options form.
I hope I haven't written too badly in unverified English.
Feel free to open any new question centered on any atomic and code problem on this subject.
I have a SplitContainer on my form that has its Dock property set to Fill. It contains several child controls, many of which have event handlers attached to them. Later I decide to put a StatusStrip at the bottom of my form. Guess what, I can't set the StatusStrip to dock to the bottom of my form. The SplitContainer will continue to Fill the entire form. Even though the StatusStrip apparently gets docked to the bottom, it actually hides the bottom part of the SplitContainer behind it.
The only around it is to CUT the SplitContainer and then PASTE it back. Cutting the SplitContainer makes the StatusStrip the only control on my form and thus lets it capture the bottom docking. Afterwards, pasting the SplitContainer allows it to fill the remaining area. In short, docking uses First Come, First Serve method.
Now since my controls have lots of event handlers attached to them, cutting and pasting becomes a nightmare for me. Having my project in C# means I have to attach all those event handlers manually.
Is there a better work around?
This is a z-order issue between the splitter and the statusstrip. When you have a control you want to dock fill and one or more controls you want to dock top, left, right, or bottom, you have to have the fill control be the first in the z-order.
The better way is to open the Document Outline tool, select the SplitContainer and use the up or down buttons to change its z-order.
I should add that in Winforms the z-order is specified by the order in which you add controls to the Controls collection. That order determines the order the associated system controls are created, hence their z-order. Using the Document Outline tool to alter z-order simply causes the generated code to be re-ordered.
I'm new to Windows Forms in Visual Studio, and I am wondering how to automaticly resize controls to the window size.
Say, I have 2 controls in a panel, a List Box and a Button. I want the button to dock to the bottom, and I want the List Box to fit the rest of the space. when the window resizes, the button should be at the bottom (as expected with docking), and the list box should stretch down to the button.
Is there a way to do this without any code?
Thanks.
Dock is pretty easy to use, but I recommend using the Anchor properties instead. Resize your form to a reasonable size in the Designer. Then, place your controls to look the way you want. Then, decide which controls should resize with the form and set the Anchor property as follows:
If you want the control to resize with the form in width, set the Right anchor.
If you want to resize height, set the Bottom anchor.
If you want the control to stay right when the form resizes, unset the Left anchor.
If you want the control to stay bottom when the form resizes, unset the Top anchor.
The problem I have with Docks is that they sometimes act funny when controls are not declared in a specific order, and to get the effect you want, sometimes you have to create extraneous panels just to hold controls.
It really gets messy when you want to maintain the aspect ratio of each control. One way, which is not really up to the mark if you want to get into fixing the details, is to use TableLayoutPanel and use Dock and Anchor wisely to achieve what you want.
Use the dock and fill options on the controls. Look under properties for each object, and containers if they are in any.
You can use SplitContainer
Google for examples. Here is one
Try setting your ListBox's Dock property to Fill.
You'll need to watch for one thing though: by default the ListBox will size itself to display whole list items. If you resize the control so that it displays a partial item it will adjust itself so it will display a complete item. This can make the control appear to lose its 'Dock'ing behavior. The solution for this is to set the ListBox's IntegralHeight property to false, which specifies that the control not resize itself to fit complete items.
I am creating a GUI with C#. I intended to use a ListView to see preview of pictures, and a PictureBox to display the full view. I used a Panel as parent and placed a PictureBox inside of that to have scrollbars appear on the picture box.
What I still can't figure out how to do is to provide close, maximize, and minimize, buttons on the Panel, as seen in many GUI applications.
How can I do this? Any ideas will be appreciated.
Those other GUI applications probably use a Form instead of a Panel/PictureBox, assuming that they provide maximize, minimize, and close buttons.
You could add your own buttons to the Panel control, and then write code in their Click event handlers to do whatever you want with the control. This is easy and relatively straight-forward if you just want to be able to close the picture, but it seems like unnecessary work to duplicate all of the functions that are built right into a Form.
I'd ditch the Panel control, add a new Form to my project, place the existing PictureBox control onto the form that I just added, and go from there. You might want to set the form's FormBorderStyle property to something like "SizableToolWindow", depending on how you want it to look.
I am just trying to create a form control in winform in .net with custom shaped of balloon shape.
There is need of a balloon tooltip which is transparent and I can put buttons on tooltip,but
tooltip in .net does not provide facality that we can put the buttons on tooltip control so
I want to make a form control looks like a balloon tooltip and so I can put buttons on that form looking like a tooltip.But I cannot show window form control look like a balloon tooltip.
So what should I do??
I tried in one way that I create a image in powerpoint of balloon shape and set it to as background image of form property.But there is no solution with that.
The Control class supports a BackColor with an alpha < 255, it is automatic. It asks the Parent to draw itself to produce the background of the control, then draws itself on top of that. However, you'll want a top-level window for a balloon. That's a window type that can arbitrarily overlap another window and isn't confined by the client area of an underlying window. It has no Parent. A ToolTip is such a window.
The only control available in Windows Forms that can be an top-level window is a Form. Problem is: the transparency trick no longer works. Since a top-level window doesn't have a Parent, there isn't any obvious window to ask to draw the background. It could be many windows, belonging to other processes. You can get transparency in a Form with its TransparencyKey property. But that's a "hard" transparency, equivalent to an alpha of 0. You probably want a soft one. Another nasty problem is that drawing anti-aliased (ClearType) text no longer works since there is no reliable background pixel color anymore.
Long story short: you can't make this work well unless you confine the balloon to the client area of a form. A control, not a form.
You can try to hook on the Paint event of the control and draw the Visual of the button there.