I have an application with a small overview window to navigate the canvas faster. On that window I display a flowchart with relations and decisions , etc... When the flowchart grows the overview window doesn't display the line's anymore this is because the line thickness is less then 1 px.
I've already tried to set the snap to device pixels on the lines,the canvas with the brush on it,but without success.
Is there an option to make the brush display the lines even if they are less thin then 1 px?
If I understand you correctly, you have essentially a minimap to navigate your Window. In which case, have a look at rendering controls as bitmaps: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.imaging.rendertargetbitmap.aspx
It should be pretty simple to render your canvas and display it in the overview window.
Related
Need a quick suggestion for styling a WinForm. I made it with rounded corners even when re-sized. Now trying to add a close button with a image (ControlBox=false), overlapping or clipped to top right corner. This is what I could end with.
But I wish to make it more like in this example image.
How could I achieve this in WinForm.
Here's the trick : your window doesn't just end with the white part. It extends a little bit further. The close button comes under the 'extra' part. The other sides where the window appears to not be there is actually transparent...or in the case of the image, semi-transparent.
The glow effect is provided by the window. Set the TransparencyKey property of the window to Color.Magenta (its a convention as Magenta is the color least likely to be used in a window). Then set the background image to a white background with a little bit of Magenta in the edges. The Magenta will appear transparent when set as the background image.
Fiddle around with TransparencyKey and you'll understand what I mean
Winforms itself cannot provide this for you without outside manipulation of the windows,
because it still uses win32 windows classes in the background.
If you want transparancy in windows: see articles like:
Cool, Semi-transparent and Shaped Dialogs with Standard Controls
And the method in Win32 to do it:
SetLayeredWindowAttributes
I'm building a form with two layers of controls. The bottom layer is a set of Panels with defined properties, one of which is a color different from the form background. The top layer is a set of picture boxes I'm using to display a circle. I've set the PictureBox Background to Color.Transparent, and I've offset it from the underlying Panel by one pixel to get the form to draw the underlying Panel. However, the area around the circle in the PictureBox is displaying the Form Background color, not the panel color. I don't want to draw the circle in the Panel, because I want the circles to move between Panels, and actually look like just a circle that's floating across the form independent of the Panel board underneath. Think of the effect as moving a piece on a board game (you see the peg move across the board, possibly on a diagonal not following the normal game path, then stop in a place on the game).
How can I get the PictureBox to have the underlying Form and panels show through, not just the form background color? I'm using C# Visual Studio 2010, and I'm not a terribly experienced programmer, so a code example would be helpful. An image of the form is at:
http://www.imageurlhost.com/images/salgmpcxvcz830c3flt.jpg
Found a way around the problem. I got rid of the Panels for the spaces in the game, and instead drew them as rectangles on the form's background image.
I'm in the process of making a WPF program that:
can scan a bitmap image, pixel-by-pixel, and assign it a data value (0-255)
design a class that allows panning and zooming of the picture
create a histogram, from the data values, that overlays the bitmap image.
I was able to do all three, however the issue that I am having is that the histogram doesn't dynamically (I think that's the word for it) stretch as I re-size the main window. Actually, nothing stretches to the correct size in the main window (the bitmap image just re-centers itself while keeping the same size). The histogram originally started as a transparent canvas that had many rectangle children. I changed it to a grid but am getting the same results as the canvas; the rectangles don't want to stretch horizontally or vertically. If I do set a horz/vert alignment the histogram disappears altogether. Can anyone help with this problem?
I ended up making a class that was a derivative of the canvas class i cave it some rendering overrides and a paint method that took into account the actual width and height of the window.
I think I must be missing something obvious, but I'm unable to find this after several hours of searching. Is there no way to use a PictureBox or other control to contain an image with partial transparent/alpha-blended pixels, and place that over another image and have the blending be based on the image under it?
For example, this produces the results I want:
Place a panel on a form.
Add an OnPaint handler.
In the OnPaint handler draw 1 PNG, then draw another PNG over it, using Graphics.DrawImage for both.
This does not:
Place a PictureBox on a form and set it to a PNG.
Place another PictureBox on the form and set it to a PNG.
Place the 2nd picture box over the first.
...even if the 2nd picture box is just empty and has a background color of Transparent, it still covers the picture below it.
I've read this stems from all winform controls being windows, so by nature they aren't transparent.
...but even the 15 year old platform I'm migrating from, Borland's VCL, had several windowless controls, so it's hard to imaging winforms doesn't at least have some easy solution?
My first example above is one answer, true, but that adds a lot of work when you can only use one big panel and draw all of your "controls" inside of it. Much nicer if you can have separate controls with separate mouse events/etc. Even if not an image control, and a control I have to draw myself, that would be fine, as long as I can just put one image in each control. In VCL they called this a "paint box", just a rectangle area you could place on a form and draw whatever you want on it. Has it's own mouse events, Bounds, etc. If you don't draw anything in it, it is like it's not even there (100% transparent) other than the fact it still gets mouse events, so can be used as a "hot spot" or "target" as well.
The PictureBox control supports transparency well, just set its BackColor property to Transparent. Which will make the pixels of its Parent visible as the background.
The rub is that the designer won't let you make the 2nd picture box a child of the 1st one. All you need is a wee bit of code in the constructor to re-parent it. And give it a new Location since that is relative from the parent. Like this:
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
pictureBox1.Controls.Add(pictureBox2);
pictureBox2.Location = new Point(0, 0);
pictureBox2.BackColor = Color.Transparent;
}
Don't hesitate to use OnPaint() btw.
Sorry, I just found this... once I decided to Google for "winforms transparent panel" instead of the searches I was doing before, the TransPictureBox example show seems to do exactly what I need:
Transparency Problem by Overlapped PictureBox's at C#
Looks like there are 2 parts to it:
Set WS_EX_TRANSPARENT for the window style
Override the "draw background" method (or optionally could probably make the control style Opaque).
I am working through the above Tutorial from ScottGu located here (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/pages/silverlight-tutorial-part-6-using-user-controls-to-implement-master-detail-scenarios.aspx) and I am trying to figure how when the UserControl loads, the background page is 'grayed' out like that? Where is that code for that?
I am trying to extract that logic into my own Page / UserControl scenario and when I load the UC, the background is still fully 'visible'. Thanks for any advice!
Under the heading Building a Basic Modal Dialog Using a User Control, Scott's post describes:
"The first control above is configured to stretch to take up all of the available space on the screen. Its background fill color is a somewhat transparent gray (because its Opactity is .765 you can see a little of what is behind it). The second control will then be layered on top of this Rectangle control, and take up a fixed width on the screen."
The Rectangle "grays out" the contents of the screen.