I'm looking to have a Windows Forms toolbar overflow its buttons onto a second toolbar another level down rather than having the dropdown menu. We find that it is not obvious to our users that they need to click the dropdown to see more tools. Suggestions?
Break your toolbar up into several smaller toolbars, like how MS Office does it. This way you can arrange them on as many rows as you like.
If breaking this into multiple toolbars will not provide the user experience that you want (although it is clearly the best practice), I believe you can listen to the Resize event, and then move all items from the Items collection that have IsOnOverflow set to true to a second tool strip.
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Is there a standard .NET control for what I call "a two pane picker", or do I have to code it by hand?
Two pane picker:
The left pane has a list of items.
The user can pick items from the left pane to put them in the right pane using buttons between the two panes.
Picked items in the right pane can be reordered with buttons.
An example of the "two pane picker" can be found by right clicking the Quick Access toolbar in Word 2007 and clicking "Customize Quick Access Toolbar..."
Note: If applicable, VB.NET answers preferred, but C# answers are acceptable too.
There's no standard control for that. Sounds like an excellent case for a custom user/composite control.
There are no .NET Framework controls which create the functionality you describe, however it is fairly easy to implement. Here's some examples I was able to find (not tested):
https://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=1253&lngWId=10
http://www.dotnetspider.com/resources/18324-Content-Transfer-between-Two-listboxes.aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vbgeneral/thread/2082caa0-5ece-4ad8-8077-8c7170fa6f9f
There is no standard picker. You have to build it yourself or find a third party control.
I don't know of anything like that, but its trivial to implement with two ListBoxes and some buttons. When 'Add' is clicked, do .Remove with the item at the selectedIndex from the left and .Add it to the ListBox on the right.
Our WPF application in the current design opens new windows for list screen.We don't have restrictions on the number of windows you open etc.We are using a ribbon control and well it has tab support.Which is better a new window or a tab? (With windows 7 having a better group of window management etc) Should I go in for tab or leave it as window. I can't make the detail screen tab since well the user click of a item in the grid to select and edit.Any valid suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Tabs in a Ribbon shouldn't change the view. The Ribbon is an enhanced toolbar, not a view changer.
If your using the MS Ribbon via OfficeUI, then there is a stipulation in the design guidelines that the view should never change the appearance of the ribbon (apart from loading context tabs) and that they ribbon should never wholesale change the view.
In regards to your question, do you mean that you have list/grid and you want a view to be able to change the data in the row. Eg. they double click a row, a view appears that gives them the ability to edit that row?
The right way is to ask your users what they like more. If you can't ask users, ask yourself - what you find more convenient - to open\close windows or switch between tabs. I wouldn't rely on win7 task bar as it's grouping behavior can be disabled or users may use another OS. Also I would suggest to check Microsoft guidelines for using ribbon.
Do you need to see more than one pane's content at once? Windows allow this, but tabs do not.
Tabs make management of the various windows easier at the expense of some flexibility.
Are your users likely to be running on multiple windows?
It is really hard to give a confident answer to you on this one without knowing more about your application and your user's requirements.
Windows 7 displays multiple previews on grouped windows of the application, however in case of tab, like IE, you will have to write quite a good custom code to show your tabs in preview of Windows 7 taskbar, which in case of Multiple Windows, it will be done automatically.
Not only that, Windows 7 also lets you put seven toolbar buttons on the preview windows, very few people knows about it because no application currently does it.
For tabs you will need to do extra programming to support multi window preview.
So its better to stay with multi window solution for now.
However in case of IE, if you try to use Windows 7 taskbar, the tabs dont align themselves in correct order of what is displayed in preview, it could be bug, but yes there might be certain limitations because when user chooses the tab to preview you will not be able to show them preview unless you make it active and thats why its little bad.
I recommend playing with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome if you want to see tabs at their finest.
Notice that tabs can be teared out into a separate window and windows can be docked as tabs.
I have a ContextMenuStip that contains a dynamically generated list of ToolStripMenuItem objects. The problem is that when there are too many of them to fit onto the screen, tiny scroll buttons appear at the top and at the bottom of the list, and scrolling through the list is a bit tedious.
How can I make the menu to automatically break into 2 or more columns so the user does not have to scroll?
This behaviour was dropped from Windows some while ago -note that Windows Vista/7 use a tree to show programs in the start menu. I suspect that this was because it presents too much data and decision making for the user.
Are you sure that this is the best way to present the choices to the user?
If so, then you will probably need a custom menu control which will be quite a lot of work.
If not, then you should consider how
you can achieve the same choices with
other controls. How about a list with
a filter?
Is there some natural grouping to the
items? If so you could split into
listboxes, comboboxes or trees.
Does the application need splitting
into different modes?
Are the items numbers? - if so a
numeric up/down control might work
The general approach is to simplify the amount of decision making that the user has to make at any moment.
Spend some time playing with all the controls in the WinForms toolbox to see what works well.
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.
I'm searching a C# component or code snipped that does something like that:
I want to inform new users about the most important program functions if he opens a new window for example.
It should be a box showing text (formated if possible) that is of course not modal and has some mechanism to 'go out of the way' if the user enters the textbox area. So that he can access what's underneath it. Alternativly the window could also stick to the border of the window, but there needs to be a way that this also works if the window is maximized.
So I want to present him with a short introduction of what he can do in every corner of my app most painlessly.
Thank you!
I use a "bar" at the top of every window to display some information about the current window/dialog.
Use tooltips. They can be programmatically controlled, and you can have them appear at will. You'll need to add the functionality to your app to keep track of what tooltips have been shown to the user already.
You can add a "balloon" style by setting the IsBalloon property to true.
You can also replace them with smaller descriptions for when the user wants to hover over the control and have them displayed again.
I'm already using tooltips heavily. However, they aren't very practical when displaying bigger amounts of data and they are bound to specific user actions.
Have you considered having a contextual menu for each form / page which contains links to Adobe Captivate style presentations for each available task? That way the user can investigate an example of how to achieve a task relating to what they are trying to achieve from within the application / site.
This approach would require a good deal of maintenance and management if your code changes regularly but coordinating it with a training department can provide rich help features in your application.
See http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/ for more information.