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.
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'm a little bit frustrated with forms and feel like there have to be some features that I do not know yet (I'm still new to this). Currently I want to toggle two panels on button click, and have one panel move out on the left while the other moves in on the right. I can get it working somehow, but I'm losing so much time because I can only work on the panel that I see and have to keep dragging the panel that is out of the main form into the main form in order to see it and work on it.
Is there a way to also draw elements that are technically out of the draw range?
The panels should have transparent background and the main form background should not move , so moving in another form does not look like a viable option.
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 am working on a Win Forms application which has tab and many tab pages are there. All of these are having many contorls on them. I need to manage form's top,left, right and bottom margins. Before I was managing this manaually by selecting and moving controls/ labels and by trying to make there margin equal but it is a little hard after some tabs to manage margions of form and contorls in form and also between controls.
Please advice what can be best and professional way to manage this.
Edit
My conrol heraricy is as below:
Form > Tab Contorl > Tab Page > Form Spliter > Input Controls
Form Spliter is Dock to Left.
Set each tab page's Padding property (it's in the Property Grid in the Properties panel). It will help with aligning controls using the visual designer. Also make sure you're using the Anchor property to handle resizing without needing to write your own code.
Note that if you have a form with lots of tab pages with lots of controls on, chances are you're doing something wrong.
The best approach is to create a composite UserControl for each tab page. It really does simplify things.
Instead of moving controls one by one , you can use the easiest way. Click on the window then Press ctrl+A then press Arrow Buttons. This helped a lot for me.
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.