Who fancies a challenge?
I'm currently working on the ControlTemplate for a chromeless Window which will be a part of a reusable theme assembly. I want the behaviors for moving, closing, minimizing and restoring to be implicit so I've written attached behaviors for this functionality which I've then included in the template.
Now,..I've come to resizing and I've come to a junction. For better or worse I'm handling the mouse move in the behavior and finding whether the cursor is inside the resizing 'zones'. I'm far enough to change the cursor appropriately but now I've gotten to actually resizing the window there are three options I've come across.
I could hand-ball the affair and adjust the Left & Top and Width & Height as needed. This is the simplest option and is easily achievable using attached behaviors but it seems like moderately heavy lifting and I understand that WPF will continue to render as the window is adjusted causing flickering,..which sucks.
The second option is to get a message hook and listen for WM_NCHITTEST and the like but the solutions I've found so far involve me sub-classing Window and I don't want to force consumers of the theme to use any controls that aren't framework provided.
The last option is to somehow draw a rectangle on the screen showing the are the Window will take up as the mouse is dragged and then resize on MouseUp,..which seems doable but it's not something I've done before so some pointers on that would be cool.
So,..what should I do? The Win32 route seems like my best option so far but I'd rather not if someone has a 'purer' solution that works. I'm happy to get suggestions with option 3 and anything right up to .Net 4 in case some dynamic magic might be possible.
Thanks in advance.
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 used this code from the code project in order to display a .png image (with transparency). At line 87 I tried to add a label in which I succeeded but somehow It won't appear on the form. I tried Refresh, Invalidate but none of them worked. Maybe someone can point me into the right direction.
I think, since you're using UpdateLayeredWindow the "normal" painting mechanism is disabled, i.e. no WM_PAINT messages are sent to the window, and the WinForms library has no chance to render the Label Controls.
I found this article about using layered windows on MSDN stating:
Note that when using UpdateLayeredWindow the application doesn't need to respond to WM_PAINT or other painting messages, because it has already provided the visual representation for the window and the system will take care of storing that image, composing it, and rendering it on the screen. UpdateLayeredWindow is quite powerful, but it often requires modifying the way an existing Win32 application draws.
So I'm afraid that WinForms isn't able to work together with your approach. Even if it would, you would likely get unpleasant results since "real" transparency is not easily done with winforms (i.e. the labels wouldn't show up transparently but would be drawn the parent forms background color)
I implemented something in Windows Forms similar to DragMove but with boundaries set to 10 units of the margins of the primary screen.
When switching over to WPF I found this thread to be useful in achieving the same result.
However, since this is a post-move event, what happens is that if my window is dragged beyond the boundaries I set, it "jumps" back. I would like to avoid this effect as it looks terrible.
Is there a simple way to avoid the window to be moved outside a given area without using the LocationChanged event? I basically want to restrict the movement of the window before it happens.
These this are very hard to achieve with WPF because it does not expose the base Win32 functions and events like WinForms did. I had a project where I needed to to resize a window and I had to use PInvoke SetWindowPos to do this in a normal manner.
AddHook may help you, but this will still be quite difficult. See http://www.wpfmentor.com/2009/01/how-to-get-hwnd-and-hook-into-wndproc.html and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.interop.hwndsource.addhook.aspx for more information.
I am trying to make my application "flip" when the minimize button is pushed. By flipped, it should be kinda like a coin when flipped. It "flips" down into the taskbar. I am wondering how effects like this are accomplished in WinForms using C#. Can this be done or does something like this need to be done using DirectX?
You could P/Invoke AnimateWindow() to get effects like this. Visit pinvoke.net for the declarations you'll need. Beware that the novelty of this wears off very quickly, definitely make it a user-selectable option.
I don't know, but you can control (including animate) what's displayed within your application window. Doing what you want may therefore require you to animatedly move your window towards the taskbar, while flipping its contents.
This isn't something that WinForms natively supports. You could attempt to "simulate" a flipping window by shrinking the width of the form slowly to 0 and then growing another form at that location to the proper size that looks like the "back" of the window.
But there isn't anything like animations or transitions in winforms. You need to go to WPF for that.
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.