When you create a form in .Net it appears as a dialog box in a portrait layout.
No one normally likes to read sideways, or upside down, but I have a very valid reason to rotate the form.
Anyone knows how to do it on Windows Vista with C#?
Does it have to be in WinForms? This is very easy to do in WPF, using rotation transforms. Unfortunately, the WindowsFormsHost integration with WPF does not allow rotation transforms.
EDIT
I understand, now, that the form in question is out of the control of the poster. Writing the control in WPF won't fix the problem.
This would be a bit of extra work, but if you mainly just need the contents of the form to be rotated (and not the entire window including title bar, window controls etc., which I've never seen before), you could instead make an entirely owner-drawn usercontrol that was rotated 90 degrees, and drop it on an ordinary form. You wouldn't even have to adjust your drawing of everything, since you could do a RotateTransform on your Graphics object and then draw everything normally.
Or if you need the entire form rotated, you could make the form borderless and then do basically the same thing, drawing the title bar and windows controls yourself also.
Update: here's a link to an MSDN article that shows how to rotate the entire screen in C#:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms812499.aspx
This is for regular Windows (not Windows Mobile), so it should work for your porpoises, although it will rotate all of Windows and not just your application's form. Depending on how fast this works and your overall needs, you could rotate the screen 90 degrees when your application gets the focus, and then rotate it back to normal when your app loses focus.
Update 2: I just reread your question and comments. You're talking about rotating the window of a separate application in a separate process, so WPF will definitely not help you here. The MSDN link might be what you need. In your application, you would rotate the screen 90 degrees, then start the other application in a separate process. This would work best if you could force the separate application's window to be maximized, which you can do by P/Invoking the FindWindow and SendMessage APIs (you could also make the window always on top, which would put your computer into a sort of kiosk mode for this application). There's a version of the Process code that basically makes starting another application a blocking call, which means your app will wait for the shelled application to close before resuming. Once the app closes, you can put the screen back to its normal orientation.
Related
Hello: I am trying to create an app which will display a moving sphere. App will vary speed and direction. I've tried Adobe Flash but cannot get it smooth. Smoothness is essential in this case. So I am trying C#.
Initially, I can see that this can be implemented by:
1) Creating a PictureBox of a sphere, and using a Timer, change its coordinates. or
2) Using the this.paint function to draw a filled circle, and somehow, with a timer, erasing and redrawing it.
Can someone recommend the best path to take? I'll have a main menu where the user will chose speed/direction/how many etc... and then simply show the "game window" with the moving spheres. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
This is to be displayed on a PC only.
Thanks
-Ed
I just answered a similar question here.
NOTE: Depending on your needs, it is possible to achieve smooth animations under winforms (under certain conditions) though you are responsible for everything. wpf provides an animation framework but wpf is perhaps a milestone harder.
It probably does not matter should you pursue winforms first or WPF. You arguably could learn the basics under winforms then move over to wpf. wpf may require you to learn quite a bit before you can do anything.
Summary
Essentially what this does is to create an offscreen bitmap that we will draw into first. It is the same size as the UserControl. The control's OnPaint calls DrawOffscreen passing in the Graphics that is attached to the offscreen bitmap. Here we loop around just rendering the tiles/sky that are visible and ignoring others so as to improve performance.
Once it's all done we zap the entire offscreen bitmap to the display in one operation. This serves to eliminate:
Flicker
Tearing effects (typically associated with lateral movement)
There is a Timer that is scheduled to update the positions of all the tiles based on the time since the last update. This allows for a more realistic movement and avoids speed-ups and slow-downs under load. Tiles are moved in the OnUpdate method.
If you note in the code for Timer1OnTick I call Invalidate(Bounds); after animating everything. This does not cause an immediate paint rather Windows will queue a paint operation to be done at a later time. Consecutive pending operations will be fused into one. This means that we can be animating positions more frequently than painting during heavy load. Animation mechanic is independent of paint. That's a good thing, you don't want to be waiting for paints to occur. xna does a similar thing
Please refer to my full SO answer complete with sample code
Here are a few hints to get you going:
First you will need to come to a decision about which platform to target: WPF or Winforms.
Then you should know what to move across what; a nice Bitmap or just a circle across an empty background or a Bitmap or a Form with controls on it.
In Winforms both your approaches will work, esp. if you set a circular region see here for an example of that. (The part in the fun comment!)
And yes, a Timer is the way to animate the sphere. Btw, a Panel or even a Label can display an Bitmap just as well as a PictureBox.
For smooth movements make sure to set the Form.Doublebuffered=true, if you move across a Form. If you move across any other control (except a PictureBox or a Label) you will need to subclass it to get access to the DoubleBuffered property!
It is often also a good idea to keep the Location of a moving item in a variable as a PointF and use floats for its speed because this way you can fine grain the speed and Location changes and also the Timer Intervals!
So a lot, if not most of all Media Players have a "fullscreen" mode. My application has a WebBrowser control and also an embedded Windows Media Player control. Now the problem here is that the fullscreen mode is literal. It actually covers my whole screen.
Is it possible to somehow modify the behavior of my application so that all "fullscreen" modes only stretches to the bounds of my application. Basically only "fullsceens" inside my application?
Any hints or suggestions are welcome!
Only idea that I could come up with it somehow fool windows thinking that my application is a monitor. But maybe that's taking it too far?
No way, sir.
"Full screen" is "full screen" and it is managed by OS to cover all the screen.
If you need to adapt the video size based on parameter you can't work on full screen.
I'd like to implement a similar screen clipping functionality to that of OneNote. Basically it can draw a translucent overlay on top of the whole screen, and also freeze the screen so users can clip a portion of it.
I've done some research around and it seems that the easiest way is to create a translucent TopMost form with the size of the whole screen and then perform clipping on this form. This approach, however, is slow. I see some other suggestions about doing a Direct3D hook for drawing overlay, but this is probably too complicated and I'm not sure how stable it is with respect to different Direct3D version. Any ideas how OneNote does it?
I think instead of creating the transparent layer on top of the screen, just grab a screenshot of the whole screen and make it full screen. So users are drawing on a static image not a translucent layer. Since it is a screenshot already, it is already frozen. I think this is how they do it anyway, I doubt an application can simply freeze a screen, they take a photo of it and cover your screen with it, so its as if its frozen.
I am total newbie in .Net programming so be patient, please ;-).
I have problem with resizing window. I want to resize from my app other app's window and take screenshot of it. I do resizing based on this example: http://blogs.geekdojo.net/richard/archive/2003/09/24/181.aspx. But I have a problem. I work on a laptop with 1024x640 pixels screen resolution but I want to resize my window to 1200x1600 px. I can't do that couse display limitations. Is there any tricky solution to resize window for this resolution and take a screenshot of whole window? I've alos tried Sdesk program witch is suggested here: Create Window larger than desktop (display resolution). Any help?
I would suggest you find a way to set a virtual resolution larger than your physical resolution (basically what sDesk does), and then let your application run normally on that large desktop. Depending on your video card, you might be able to configure the virtual resolution directly in the video driver, without using any additional utility.
No it is not possible. In fact you can't resize in any way the windows greater then the display size.
Just try it by position a window in normal mode (not minimized or maximized) somewhere on the left. Grab the right border of it and increase the width till the end of your screen. Now move the window, by grabbing the title bar, some more to the left. Repeat this procedure several times. At some point you're not able to get the window any wider anymore. If you now try to move the window till the right border hits the right side of your desktop, you'll see that the left border is direct at the left desktop side.
I have a screen in my windows mobile app that I is intended for another person than the user to look at and interact with (it is a signature screen).
There is a few edit boxes and such on that screen. Is there any way to make them display upside down?
If so I would love to hear how. Thanks!
Are the controls (except the signature) purely for viewing (i.e. interaction is not needed)? If so, I'd be inclined to just take a screen shot, rotate that bitmap, draw it to the Form's background and then put the signature control on top of that.