I can draw a 3D border using ControlPaint.DrawBorder3D, but I get the 'Windows Classic' 3D border. I want to draw the current theme's 3D border - in the default XP theme, this is a 1px blue or gray border. How do I draw that, and how do I get its widths?
Sounds like you might need to look at System.Windows.Forms.VisualStyles.VisualStyleRenderer:
The System.Windows.Forms.VisualStyles
namespace exposes VisualStyleElement
objects that represent all of the
controls and user interface (UI)
elements that are supported by visual
styles. To draw or get information
about a particular element, you must
set a VisualStyleRenderer to the
element you are interested in.
To draw an element, use the
DrawBackground method. The
VisualStyleRenderer class also
includes methods, such as GetColor and
GetEnumValue, that provide information
about how an element is defined by the
current visual style.
There's a code sample on that page as well.
You will have to draw the border yourself, but you can get the color from VisualStyleElement.Window.Caption.Active and the size should be the size of the window frame (I believe), which is VisualStyleElement.Window.FrameBottom.Active. If you explore the VisualStyleElement.Window, you should be able to determine which window element has the information you need to draw your border.
Pre .NET Framework 2.0 Answer
I'm assuming that you are drawing your own, special control and you want to use elements of the currently active theme to draw it so it better fits with standard XP controls. You're NOT trying to, for example, enable theming on a standard Button control. Correct?
It's actually somewhat complicated. Your main focus should be UxTheme.dll. This houses everything you need for drawing themed controls. Here is a nice C# wrapper around this dll to make your life easier. There are others so if this isn't exactly what you wanted, I hope I've pointed you in the right direction.
Related
So I have a existing .net software using Windows Forms Control forms.
Most of used controls inherit form basic Windows Forms like: button, ComboBox or TextBox which don't have rounded corners property.
Beside that, they don't follow the dark theme (for example the ComboBox will still only have dark textbox, but arrow and square behind it still will be white)
Example here
So what's your recommendation to easily adjust look of existing controls ?
I want to make them dark theme and round coroner.
I have already tried to override On Paint metod, but i didn't figure out how to override it for example for ComboBox control.
I am creating a vector graphic editor in WPF. I am rendering the artwork using a D3DImage that has been customised using SharpDX so that I use it with Direct2D. When an item is selected, resize handles appear around the selected item. I want the cursor to change when the user hovers over these resize handles, but they are rendered in Direct2D and are not WPF elements. How do I accomplish this?
Well, if you’re doing your own rendering to D3DImage, you gotta do your own hit testing.
If your geometry’s relatively simple (boxes, circles, polylines, not too many of them), you can hit test these handles shapes in mouse move event handler. Either manually, or by using e.g. FillContainsPoint D2D APIs.
Or, if you aren’t doing something very color-sensitive like a desktop publishing, you can encode resize handles in the color of your shapes. Use a couple of least significant bits of the blue channel (human eyes are least sensitive to blue), read the color under the mouse, change cursor accordingly to the blue color value.
Or, you can switch to DXGI_FORMAT_R16G16B16A16_UNORM for your render target (looks like D2D supports that format), this way you can add much more per-pixel data to your image without any visible artifacts (use lower bytes of each of the 3 color channels). This however complicates rendering, you’ll need to do one more pass to convert the texture into A8R8G8B8 for the WPF.
P.S. I wonder why don’t you use WPF elements instead? 2D vector graphics there is rather advanced. You can easily create/manipulate/fill/outline these shapes programmatically (just place then on a canvas), this way WPF will handle all these hit tests, and rendering, and more.
I am trying to figure out how to add a full shadow around a borderless form, using WinForms. I am looking at adding a shadow around all four sides of the form.
I have tried using the DropShadow class, although it only adds the shadow to the bottom and right side corners.
I have seen this question asked many times before in my searches but nothing I cam upon had an answer for all four sides.
I am using both C# and VB.net languages in my solution so any help regarding either language would be a big help.
You are going to have to manually draw this. I have done something similar before with a splash screen, I think. You need to decide the offset of the shadow from the client area of the form and either create a container (easier layout wise) to host its constituent controls or redefine its client rectangle programmatically if you need dynamic shadow size, and then draw your border. If memory serves, you will get the best results using alpha blending + lineargradientbrush to fade the shadow transparency out to the edges.
summarizing I have implemented a chart control as a simple Canvas with a Polyline on it. The next thing I need is to be able to zoom the chart.
I would like to know how would you that (just the idea, no details needed). What I would like to do is to create somehow a bigger Canvas and paint the line bigger and just show a part of the Canvas to the user, and the he drags the Chart it will move the Canvas. Something like in the following picture. Do you think this is possible?
Kael Rowan from Microsoft Research built a ZoomableCanvas class that may do exactly what you want. You can also see all the posts he wrote about it. You can even try a running XBAP example if your browser supports it.
We use the RenderTransform for this, create your zoom and pan matrix( or transform ) and apply that to your canvas. The nice thing is, that you can still have elements that can display behind or on top of the canvas with the identity transform or with another. For example for a grid or screen space elements like a minimap, which should always be visible. You might also want to look into this old question, which is somehow related.
I use windows form with GlassForm(using Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Shell;). my problem when I change form to GlassForm my textbox texts doesnt
Place a panel on the form set the dock style to fill, set the panel's BackColor to color X and then set the form's TransparencyKey to the same color X.
Yes, that's how it works. With the Aero Glass effect applied, anything drawn in the color black will be rendered as transparent. That includes text in a textbox control. This general theme has been the subject of many other questions here. When well-written, they gather lots of upvotes, but few answers.
There just aren't a lot of good solutions here. All of them that I've come across qualify as both "ugly" and "hackish". Owner-drawing is a reasonable approach when you're using something like a label control, but I wouldn't recommend trying to draw your own textbox—it's just too hard to get right. Someone tried to do that here; like I said, the result is both ugly and hackish. I wasn't satisfied with it for my own use, but it may work for you, depending on how high your standards are.
The goal with owner-drawing, of course, is either to do all of the drawing using GDI+ (which natively supports transparency) instead of GDI (which all of the built-in controls use by default), or calling functions like DrawThemeTextEx, which is specifically designed for rendering text with a shadow that is [somewhat] readable over glass.
As well, the usual tricks like enabling compatible text rendering (which causes the built-in controls to draw using GDI+ routines, as they did in the early versions of .NET) don't work for a textbox.
Honestly, your best bet is to place the textbox over a region of your form that is not rendered as glass. Use the DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow function to selectively enable the glass effect behind certain areas of your form, rather than the entire thing. I provide a complete, ready-to-use .NET implementation in my answer here.
Check this sample out:
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/Glass-In-C-An-Alternative-Approach.aspx
I was not studying it any further but putting a TextBox or Button or other components over this Aero glass area worked - the rendered component didn't have the transparency problem. The labels aren't perfect but these can be easily drawn with GDI+
The direct link to the sample project is here: http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/MothGlass.zip
It looks like he puts a panel behind the control and setting the TransparencyKey for the panel.