For a OSS project, I'm trying to add controls programmatically to a WinForms view.. and I want to make these editable and resizeable as in the Visual Studio Designer. I've been playing around with adding programmatically, using Controls.Add(label).. but I'm struggling to work out how to make the UI editable.
I'm assuming it would make use of DesignMode - but I can only find getters and not setters for these properties. Simply put - is there any way of enabling and disabling DesignMode in WinForms programmatically?
I'm yet to investigate WPF - perhaps that would be able to have editable controls?
Many thanks, sorry to be a pain right after christmas..
T
Actually there is a way to make UI editable as in VS designer.You have to host the winforms designer on your form.
this info might help:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163634.aspx
It is available in WinForm as explained by alexm. Unfortunately this is not true for the WPF designer. There you would have to implement your own designer.
As far as I know, the Designer functionality is implemented in Visual Studio, and is not part of the WinForms runtime libraries. The DesignMode property is read-only because it gives information about the execution context; this is not something that can be changed on the fly (as a side note: this property is not as easy to use as one would hope).
If you want to make the UI editable at runtime (i.e. changing the size/layout of controls), you would have to implement a lot of the behavior manually (e.g. OnMouseDown handlers, etc.). If you wanted to do things like drawing bounding boxes with grabbable corners, you might need to delve into custom drawing.
I'm not sure about WPF, as I have much less experience with it, but this question on SO has some information about making controls resizable at runtime.
Related
During an interview, the company was asking about my use of custom controls in WPF. I have found with all of the power of the WPF way of creating a control (datatemplate, control template, styles,triggers etc... ) that having to write a custom control that overrides the OnRender method really hasn't been necessary. Later found out that most of their development has been in Winforms.
If coming at a control from a 100% WPF direction, how often is it necessary to write a customcontrol with OnRender overrides? The Winform approach is really not making use of the WPF composition technique of creating controls and it seemed like a question not based on much WPF knowledge.
Thanks
Harold
Good question (though a bit opinion-based) and no answers? Fixing.
If you are winforms-experienced developer, then thinking winform-way is still acceptable in wpf. For a while. This is where you may find self making mostly custom controls (containing xaml and code, or even without xaml). But the more you learn, the less you need that. Many many tasks can be completed in wpf simply because it is very flexibly. Every entity consist of something what can be customized: templates, styles, converters, behaviors or even plain event handling.
You can start with custom control and then find out what you don't really need it (or it can be downgraded to simple restyling).
When I started making first serious wpf project, there were 3 custom controls and they are still. Here is why.
Outlined TextBlock. Simply because you need custom OnRender (to build and draw geometry for outline).
Animated content. To apply transition animation when changing content. I could almost make it without custom control, but there is a problem - calculating animations logic when transitioning left-to-right, right-to-left, up-down or down-up. It's waaaay easy to have in one custom control. But possible with UserControl and view, not as pretty still.
Graph. Simply because it's too complicated to be presented with Visual and because of performance using gdi+ gives millions of points (hundered thousands figures) to be drawn within ms.
Conclusion: it's good and useful, though way less than it was in winforms (where you simply had no other option).
I was trying to do something in visual studio the other day when I realized, if I could just make a form control to do it for me it would be allot easier, except I have no idea how to do that, I want the form control to have grids, each square having its own color property, if anyone knows how to make form controls, or even better knows how to make something like what I just described, I would be very happy :D
This MSDN article is a basic step by step outline of how you can write a customer control.
Unfortunatly MS has not figured out how to do avoid link rot -- so you may need to search creating custom winform controls to find this if you come in the future.
You are usually best servered by subclassing an existing control and customizing it.
You might also find some of the freely available winform control projects a gold-mine of useful info if you get serious about this.
However, it sounds likely what you should consider doing is creating a "User Control", this is usually simpler for a composite of few existing controls. This
article on the types of controls for winforms may be a useful overview for you.
Beyond that you really should use S/O if you are trying to resolve a specific problem you are having when you are coding. Google is a more appropriate tool for finding tutorials, etc.
1) Inside your project: Solution Explorer --> Right Click the .csproj --> Add UserControl
2) Drag and drop gridBox or any control you want into your custom control.
3) Check the ToolBox, your custom control should be located at the very first selection
Using C# winforms, i want to create custom controls that looks like the real ones.
There are a lot of classes that can be used to draw controls that looks like the real ones: ControlPaint, VisualStyleRenderer, ButtonRenderer, CheckBoxRenderer, ComboBoxRenderer, GroupBoxRenderer, ProgressBarRenderer, RadioButtonRenderer, ScrollBarRenderer, TabRenderer, TextBoxRenderer, TextRenderer, ToolStripProfessionalRenderer, ToolStripRenderer, ToolStripSystemRenderer, TrackBarRenderer.
The problems coming when considering visual styles: I want to be visual styles independent. Meaning: I dont care if user allowing visual-styles or not, i want it to work. if user enabled visual-styles, i want to draw it using visual-styles, otherwise i want to draw it without visual-styles.
By the MSDN documentation, the only classes that are visual-styles independent are ButtonRenderer, CheckBoxRenderer, GroupBoxRenderer, RadioButtonRenderer. That means that for all other cases i need to check myself if visual-styles enabled and use different code to draw the parts.
Suppose i want to draw a Tab control parts myself. TabRenderer class has all needed functionality for that, but it works only if user enabled visual styles. otherwise I need to use ControlPaint class to draw, but it uses completely different model, there is no ControlPaint.DrawTab() method or something like that, and i need to figure out what rectangle types i need to draw so it will look like a real tab. that`s annoying.
The built-in controls, including the Tab control, already have this functionality of drawing themselves with or without visual styles. Why doesn`t microsoft exposing this functionality for the custom control creators? Why are custom control creators should suffer?
It's a pain unfortunately, but that is the cost for writing custom controls. The way I have seen Microsoft do this in many of the WinForm controls, is to check Application.RenderWithVisualStyes, and Control.UseVisualStyleBackColor. Depending on those values they will paint the control accordingly.
A common pattern they use is to create internal classes called MyControlRenderer.cs. Inside this renderer is where the magic actually happens. If you look at the NET REF code, you will see that they also use VisualStyleRenderer class from System.Windows.Forms.VisualStyles namespace, and there is some actual paint code as well.
You will need to utilize a mix of these various classes and tools, and a mix of also doing your own work. Testing your control on a machine with, and without visual styles.
When I hope home from work I will post a bit more.
I need a control in my C# program that behaves exactly the same as MS Expression Blend keyspline control - is there any way to get hold of that control and add it to my application?
As a side note it'd be nice to use some of the other controls that appear in that applications as well
What do you mean by add it to your application? If you're developing a C# WPF application you can already add it using the Blend designer or programatically in Visual Studio.
You can inherit from all the WPF controls to create new ones that enhance the behaviour if needed. If you simply want to customise the feel of a control you can use styles within Expression Blend. If you want to customise the complete look, feel and behaviour of a control you also have the option of templates.
Ok sorry for uing the wrong terminology.
I want to add the control into Visual Studio 2005's toolbox (or indeed Expression Blend's Asset Library) so that I can drag and drop it into any C# WPF applications I create.
The problem is I don't know what the Expression Blend Keyspline control is called and how to get access to it (ie what dll to include as a reference)?
I can try and go through Expression Blend's dll's etc searching for the control but I'm not sure A) that this will work, B) that its a bit long winded, C) what the licensing is for such controls.
I think what you want to do is add a Storyboard, that's where you will then have the option to set the animations including KeySplines for your different controls. A KeySpline by itself is not actually a control it is an animation that acts on a control.
To add a Storyboard click the little plus icon at the top of the "Objects and Timeline" panel (to the right of where is says No Storyboard Open).
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.