I bet you guys know Google Chrome browser, yeah it comes from Chromium open-source projects, added some Google specific features.
I found the multi-tab GUI is quite attractive, especially the "drag-and-drop" feature for tabs and windows:
to "pull a tab" out to form a separate window, or
vice versa, to join a tab into a windows (that has a collection of tabs).
This would be quite helpful for designing some multi-process applications to achieve the stability, and a cool user experience, but ... how?
is it possible to do this in WPF?
or even one step more, is it possible to do this in MVVM?
Yeah, technically, everything is possible, but I can't see an easy pattern to do this
for WPF, how to handle such specific "crossing window" mouse interaction?
for MVVM, hmmm, will this be too challenging for MVVM?
cheers
maybe you should have a look at these libs/frameworks:
http://fabtab.codeplex.com/
http://avalondock.codeplex.com/
http://fluidkit.codeplex.com/
Its definitely possible. I've recreated the chrome tab look in the past with MVVM, complete with drag and drop, and I know another guy who created a tabbed application that lets you "pull away" tabs into a new window of its own. I believe it was all one application with multiple windows, so all open windows were part of the same application even if they show up separately in the task bar.
I'm not sure if I have his source code or not, I'd have to go digging for it.
Related
Well ... at the risk of sounding like I really don't know anything about programming, I have a question about controls in Silverlight 5.
I have an OOB App that I am working with, but I need to add the User Menus (File, Edit, etc.) that are normally seen at the top of all apps. There used to be a control in VS (the Menu control) that was easily configurable. What is the control used to create the User Menus in Silverlight 5? The Context Menu is not what I am asking about. That is the right mouse click menu ... so that's not the answer ...
Please, understand my problem. It's been since Silverlight 2 since I worked in Silverlight. I appreciate any information you kind folks would be willing to provide.
There is no such thing available directly from Microsoft (meaning it's neither built-in or present in the Silverlight Toolkit).
You will have to use third-party controls such as DevExpress or Telerik.
EDIT: Some more advice in response to your comment.
Another possibility is to create UIs from scratch. There are two forms of UIs that I found inspiring lately, both of which don't use any ribbons or drop-down menues at all. The first is to use "Windows 8"-like dashboards instead of traditional menues, the other is the Windows Azure Management Portal (a web application).
I don't use traditional UI frameworks for menues myself, but mostly because I don't like those approaches and I'm picky with how user interfaces should work and look like.
But obviously you have to make a serious time investment to go new ways. And it will heavily depend on your application what approach makes sense.
Here's one simple approach that could work in a number of cases, I used it for a database application (I call it the Windows-Phone-7/8 approach):
The screen is divided into the "page" area and information bars. The information bars contain no menues, just who's logged on, a back-button, a home-button, and context-sensitive buttons depending on what's in the view. So basically it behaves like a web browser and you navigate through the app by clicking on "links" (buttons that take you elsewhere).
There's only one page area, so no windows and no popups. I've gone to the extreme of making even dialog windows to be pages.
Now you need menues. You do that with "dashboards", ie. pages that present some overview stuff and buttons that lead to the other areas of your application.
Although you could have action buttons like save or delete on the page itself, I put them in the bottom bar (but they are still dependent on the page your on) - that is exactly how it works in Windows Phone 7/8.
One last advice: The real effort is usually not in the menus anyway. Beside your application logic itself, it's a lot of little things like login screen, error handling and how to present error messages (look at the windows azure management portal for how they did that really nicely) and gracefully failing on session timeout. There's also a lot of nuisance on how you manage your data (ria-services, etc.).
So as long as you don't need fancy data grid grouping, rich-text edit or excel-like pivot controls, a toolkit might not help you as much as you'd hope - because they give you only the controls, not the entire UI.
Does anyone know what it would take to override the look and feel of a WinForms Control Box? I don't want to change the functionality of the buttons, I just want to change the color and the images. Something similar to what Instagrille has done with their Instagram app for Windows.
The control box is created by system. AFAIK, you cannot customize it. Although you can get rid of it and create your own. This will take some effort.
You will have to P/Invoke User32.dll and override WndProc to intercept windows messages.
Take a look are these articles to begin with. This and this one.
You may be better off porting your app to WPF. The level of control you're looking for comes "for free" in with the framework and is more future proof on the Windows platform. This answer is a good place to start, there are more good links here.
If that's not an option, I think danish has you off to a start. I would be wary of attempting to extend WinForms too far beyond what it's meant to do, in my experience it can make for a headache in the future. Good luck.
I need a WPF control that acts like the Panorama control for Windows Phone 7, but I need it for a desktop application.
It will contain a series of panels (or Panorama Items) that the application will be able to slide through horizontally programmatically.
Also, the content inside the panels not currently displayed on the screen will need to be "lazy loaded". In other words, they should be referenced but not loaded or rendered.
Can I somehow adapt the WP7 Panorama control to do this? Or will I have to develop a custom control from scratch to behave similarly to it?
Thank you!
EDIT:
I could probably use a VirtualizingPanel to implement the lazyload behaviour.
MahApps.Metro while still not super mature does allow for the wp7 Panorama control. Demo of how to use a panorama here. I've played with it a little and while its not the most customizable thing out there it gets the job done. Pretty sweet. Also Sacha Barber (Codeproject Demigod) wrote up an article on making your own. Of which I haven't looked at yet but, the guy usually does awesome work. So I'd check that one out as well.
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/arielbh/archive/2010/10/21/porting-windows-phone-7-s-panorama-control-to-silverlight-4.aspx gives some clues about how do to this.
It suggests using http://phone.codeplex.com/ as your base and then you can use http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4b281bde-9b01-4890-b3d4-b3b45ca2c2e4 (Microsoft Surface Manipulations and Inertia Sample for Microsoft Silverlight) to run convert get it to respond to touch.
Seems none exist as far as I can see so far.
This blog has started an attempt at making it, so you could work from there to make your own. Be sure to also check out this page which details the creation of an individual panorama item too.
I'm trying to find a docking library for WPF that works more like google chrome. Where a user with two chrome windows open can take a tab from one and drop it in another.
I've been trying with AvalonDock but it only lets a DockableContent have one docking manager and I can't find a nice way to swap the manager when it moves over a different one.
Anyone know of a way to do this with AvalonDock or any other library?
I think that your requirements are a bit too special purpose just to find a library lying about. It sounds like AvalonDock does kind of what you want, so maybe it would be best just to modify its source for your needs. That or just roll your own from scratch.
i've been learning wpf for about a week now..
and i have a basic question:
From a business view and development view (out of your experience).. what can and what cant be done with wpf(capabilities) ..
please try to be illustrative..
examples of undesired answers:
"Fully functioning stand alone applications with alot of animation and Glittering images"
A second question:
if i build a XBAP UI for my application, can i make the UI "not show" in a browser!
if u r going to answer from tutorials/websites/books.. please dont copy paste them directly, try to write it in your own words...
You can host anything built to the Win32 GDI/USER API (WinForms, ActiveX controls) inside a WPF application, so even if you hit some limitation with an app that is mostly WPF, you can always host some old controls inside it.
And since 3.5 SP1 you can even host animated DirectX graphics pretty seamlessly as well (although WPF's 3D support provides its own much simpler ways of achieving the most commonly done things).
As for comparison, the major advantage of WPF over WinForms is the way it keeps closely to its own component-based model, so a very large proportion of controls are able to act as containers for other controls. Want to put a combo box in a menu item? Not sure why you would, but you can. More usefully, you can put a button in a list box (or tree view). These kinds of thing are not possible unless you implement every standard control from the ground up (which is what WPF does).
The disadvantages are probably temporary: it can be a little unstable on some machines (the rendering code seems vunerable to display driver incompatibility) but this gets better with each service pack. Also the text rendering has been heavily criticised - it goes a bit further with ClearType anti-aliasing than Windows normally does, so some people complain that it looks blurry.
(The reason these are likely to be temporary issues is that Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 is adopting WPF. So they are now "eating their own dogfood".)
You can pretty much do anything in WPF that you'd need from a GUI app. But that's not the real benefit, IMHO.
One of the real benefits of WPF is development speed and simplicity, once you get past the learning curve (and there is a learning curve!)
The other major benefit, and probably the biggest one, is that it allows designers to work on the presentation, do lots of interactive things, all using a designer-friendly (friendlier, anyway) tool and not having to submit requests to the coders. Just by changing the .xaml, a designer can make an application look almost completely different, and add all kinds of behaviors (panels disappearing, expanding, all kinds of neat stuff). Without changing a line of code.
You can in theory do anything in WPF what you want. Compare it with a WinForms application. Is there anything that you can't build with that? Not really. The same goes for WPF. It's just that WPF is better suited for some things, like animations, video, graphics, etcetera. As it is xaml based, it is also better suited for databinding against XML for example.
See also this related question.
As for your second question, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean if you can show websites using WPF? Yes of course, just like WinForms.
Oh, in WPF some things are still not implemented. DataGridViews as popular example are only in the codeplex preview. YOu have alot of things like theExpander which work in a differnet way, and you can have a lot of problems with autosized content.