I'm looking to create an interface which has drag-drop-dock functionality like Visual Studio. Telerik offers exactly what I'm looking for:
http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms/dock.aspx
Trouble is, it will cost $1000. This is a side project and I don't have a budget for that. Does anyone know of a similar control which is free and/or open source? Google didn't turn up any results.
Thanks
I ended up going more low-level and using OpenTk GameWindow and GWEN, which contains docking.
GWEN - GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense
https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN
It's absolutely great, but unfortunately the original project is abandoned. There are a ton of forks at different states. I've personally had a lot of success with it.
Related
Is there anyway to create more rounded/professional looking buttons using vba. I found a couple places that suggested using images, which is not a terrible Idea, but I was wondering if anyone had a clue if there is a downloadable software, add-in, or anything. The ones currently available make my program look like an Mid 90's application. I really appreciate the help. I mean look at it!!
Office VBA uses the Microsoft Forms Engine which is a lightweight (drawn) implementation of a GUI toolkit. Because of this the usual techniques used to customise button appearance on windows (owner-drawing/theming) don't apply and your stuck with what you've got.
If you don't want to use images you need to find an ActiveX control that does the job, something like http://www.arcadiahome.com/products/components/activex/powerbutton.htm .
I am using delphi as my primary development tool.
and recently I found these 2 libraries in KSDEV.com
and i found they are similar to WPF . So i just downloaded them and stated to playing with them until the time to end comes ( i have not checked its license policies yet). I am not a good WPF knowledge person but i found was WPF hard to develop.
But my doubt is , are these 2 libraries can replace WPF in delphi . what are the drawbacks Dxscene and VGscene have or what are the drawbacks WPF have ,
There are only a little articles about them in internet (google gave me millions of results but most of them repeated 2 articles which was published in KSDEV)
VGScene and DXScene can be compaired to WPF for the rendering result.
I think VG/DXScene are less resource consuming, and what I like against WPF, is that they are not XML-based.
You use regular Delphi components to define your UI.
But the learning curve and the documentation is still a bit lacking for VX/DXScene.
I found out to be a bit difficult to create forms with DXScene. VXScene is perhaps a bit easier to create your UI with the mouse.
I think the full power of these libraries will be obtained using code-generated UI.
I don't like the XML root of WPF. It's verbose, and difficult to work with, with real application with a lot of forms. For some projects, the external WPF designer could be necessary.
But don't ask Microsoft why they don't publish WPF-based applications... and they still use unmanaged code...
VgScene and DxScene are really cool libraries! You can make fast and nice looking GUI's with all kind of effects. It also has a grid component now!
But when I tried using them, I encountered some "drawbacks": there is little documentation how to make and what to use for a complex GUI (there are some nice demo's for simple GUI's though). So it has a relative high learning curve (when you only have VCL knowlegde because it is very different).
But besides these things, I think it is worth trying (only if you know how to do it and/or spend some time learning). It has good platform support (via FPC and OpenGL) so you can run it also on MacOs, Linux and iPhone/iPad!
Since they do not depend on WPF, they can be used for cross platform development in Lazarus/CodeTyphon. That is the main advantage for me. Drawback is documentation.
We are evaluating the use of WPF for an upcoming project. We plan to "commercialize" some of our internal tools and could really use some of the effects WPF offers. We also like the idea of the design layer and code layers being independent to allow concurrent work.
Where can I find a simple UI built with WPF (XAML) that I can pull apart?
What is the workflow if the designer is creating the UI and the developers are coding. What does the design staff give the developers (.XAML files? an assembly?)
From Microsoft.
An open source app with relatively simple ui that is well designed is crack.net. I used it to finally understand mvvm.
As for design workflow, that's a harder question to answer for you. You need to figure out what will work for you and your designers. They can work within the same .proj file as your developers and that's very conveinient. But you may want to separate those assemblies for management sake.
As far as workflow goes.
I had worked in a team where we had a dedicated UI designer. Though he had a degree in CS he said that using Blend distracts too much from the UI design. So he still was doing mock-ups and a developer was translating that in Blend+VS+manual XAML tweaks.
Also, despite what is claimed, Blend is most useful as an example-snippet editor to better understand XAML.
On my current WPF project I use Kaxaml mostly, since WPF editor in my installation of VS is painfully slow and in-stable.
The idea is that your designer will produce you XAML and developer will simply add code to that - didn't work for us. And honestly, I don't see how that can work at all. Since there are still many things in UI that need to be tweaked for the presentation layer.
Also, any UI technology can be isolated in a well designed system. And I don't really see any advantages of WPF at that. Especially that MS promotes data-binding so eagerly.
We are implementing an application that needs dockable windows, similar to Visual Studio 2005/2008, but with multiple "docking sites", unlike VS's single one. Does anyone have a recommendation on a good library for this - either OSS or commercial? I am aware that Infragistics has one, as well as Divelement's SandDock and WPF-Dock from DevComponents, as well as ActiPro's Docking & MDI product. There is also one on CodeProject. Has anyone used any of these libraries? Was the experience good or bad? If you have experience with one of them, does it support multiple "docking sites"?
The one from Codeproject is the AvalonDock - we use it for more then half a year now, but we're far from release yet so we have the flexibility. Before ending up with AvalonDock we tried Infragistix, ActiPro, SandDock and may be some others.
Even though AvalonDock is not 100% bug free (well what is?) there are no major ones, it is very stable, fast and has all the functionality. It does support multiple docking sites.
Its an open source project and is in active development, so bugs are beeing found and fixed. Good experience so far.
I've been using the ActiPro library for several months and it's done me well. It does support multiple docking sites. The support is outstanding and you get some other controls (date picker, etc) that are missing from WPF. To me, for $150 it's money well spent. It worked out of the box, no fuss.
We used to use Divelements for WinForm controls but we think Actipro has better support, so we switched for WPF.
Just my two cents.
Don't forget AvalonDock on GitHub (part of WPF Toolkit). I've seen it mentioned in other places.
Initially I was going to use the ActiPro library (mostly because I am already using their ribbon), but I might give AvalonDock a chance since it is open source.
Anybody have any feedback/comments on AvalonDock?
I use DotNetBar, because it has ribbon/dock and more controls, and it's inexpensive. It's great.
http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar-wpf/
SandDock is alright. We used it for a POC phase of a project. I found some pretty bad bugs in their layout saving mechanism. It generated XML, but then couldn't load this XML back; it threw an exception! I actually read through all the generated XML and had to write code to modify the XML slightly after each time it was generated. It did not seem like it was a well thought out design; I was hoping for common WPF base types like
Infragistics is a bit better but buggy. In fact, if you try running it on a machine that only has .Net 3.0 and no .Net 3.5, it doesn't work correctly. Have an outstanding dev issue with Infragistics and I don't know if they've made any progress on a fix for this. I've also had it crash a few times when floating a window and dragging it around (suspect this has to do with the .Net 3.0/3.5 issue above). I've found styling this control to be pretty un-intuitive.
I tried all the libraries listed here and they're all buggy to some extent. Although they are pricy I would recommend Telerik and Infragistics. Nevron merits a mention because their library is the best I've seen but it's for WinForms.
1 year later ...
AvalonDock is now stable and robust.
There's also an "AvalonDock wrapper" that simplifies working with it without reducing its possibilities.
See http://sofawpf.codeplex.com/
Here is another one:
http://www.essentialobjects.com/Products/EOWpf/DockView.aspx
This one has a number of built-in skins that you can switch dynamically. It also has many individual controls (such as a "Splitter" control) that you can use independently.
The explorer control in Windows Vista is very handy and I would like to be able to incorporate it in an application written in WPF. I've been unable to find a stock control that is part of the Framework. This application is being specifically developed for Windows Vista and therefore, having the same look and feel as the OS is desirable.
One could use the Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog, but the problem with that is that it looks nothing like Vista's so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Any thoughts on a good implementation would be most helpful. I would like to stay away from Third Party components if possible, but am definitely open to all suggestions.
Actipro makes a really good WPF breadcrumb control. There's also an open source WPF breadcrumb control that I might actually give a try.
I haven't yet tried it but look at VistaBridge... It gives you all the Vista look dialog boxes!
There is a replacement for the Microsoft.Win32 file dialogs on my blog that gives you the Vista look without the complexity of VistaBridge and is also backward compatible with XP.
http://www.nbdtech.com/blog/archive/2008/07/15/Vista-style-open-and-save-dialogs-with-WPF-without-using.aspx
At the risk of sounding self-serving, the best Breadcrumb control for WPF you can find is here:
http://www.teraque.com/Products/Explorer-Chrome-Suite
I've spent a year trying to reverse engineer the Window's Vista control because none of the off-the-shelf products provided the right look-and-feel. You will run into the limitations of all of the suggestions above sooner or later. And, having been through it myself, I can tell you that trying to embark on developing the controls yourself will take you months. The oddities surrounding the overflow logic alone will be enough to eat up two months just to get it right.
Good luck. If there's anything I can answer for you, please feel free to contact me.
Donald Roy Airey
Donald.Roy.Airey#teraque.com
If you are coding for the .net Framework 3.5, calling for the common dialog should display the correct Vista era dialog.
Sorry, appears I was mistaken. In previous projects, I was using this library to call the Vista dialogs.