I'm sure you're all aware of the scrolling controls used in webpages that display Twitter feeds?
Well I want to acheive a similar effect in a winforms app, but can't work out how to do it, and don't even know if it can either be done, or has been done already in a custom control somewhere?.
Basically, I want the application to poll a datasource and check for new items. If a new item exists, then create a new entry for the control, scroll down the old entries and fade in the new entry at the top. Of course the new entry addition needs to look good, so smooth scrolling and fading are essential.
Does anyone know of an existing control that can do such a thing, or have any suggestion as to where I'd start?
Related
So I have this old PowerBuilder MDI application (medium enterprise app with about 40 windows), and I'm embarking on designing my very first WPF MVVM C# application to replace the aging PowerBuilder app. I've got plenty of C# & .NET experience, but this is my first WPF & MVVM app.
After reading many forum postings after searching for WPF & MDI alternative, I've come to the conclusion that the MDI isn't supported, and that the most commonly proposed substitute is to use the TabControl and dynamically generate the content of each tab page upon demand using a WPF User Control. I had initially been sold on this, and was actually excited by my initial prototype interface with a tabbed Ribbon bar at the top of the app, and the TabControl with the tabs of the app underneath that. However, I have hit a BIG brick wall.
Take a look at the following screen shot of one of the central multi-tab windows from my old application: http://www.creativedatatech.com/downloads/screenshot.jpg
As you can see, the app has a toolbar across the top and the left side, and the example MDI child window (Case Edit Window) that is open has a LOT of tab pages (18 of them), and the users really like being able to quickly click on a tab page to get directly to that information to work on it. Moreover, the users have grown accustomed to being able to open multiple Cases at once and either put them side by side (large monitors), or flip back and forth, possibly copying & pasting between them.
The problem here is that I cannot envision how I am going to incorporate all this multi-tab user experience for the Case Edit Window into a single tab of the top level WPF TabControl. Will the users end up seeing a row of tabs for the WPF TabControl, with one tab for each Case Edit Window that is open, and then inside each "Case Edit" tab page, a further nested set of 18 tab pages?? This seems confusing and a big mess of nested tabs. Add to that the tabs of the Ribbon control at the top of the app, and I think my users will be running after me to lynch me!
After investing two straight weeks reading up on WPF and MVVM, I am left with the sinking feeling that WPF really isn't going to fly well for enterprise apps such as mine.
Surely this can't be true! Does anyone have any comments on how I should go about shaping this app to accomplish what I'm trying to do here? I've already looked at WPF "pages", but I can't have the users serially navigate through all the individual pages to get to the content that they need to work on, and they need to be able to quickly (and visually) navigate to the Case Edit Window content that they need.
I think your problem is not so much WPF, but rather that GUI paradigms have moved away from the MDI that your current app uses. There is nothing stopping you implementing MDI in WPF, but what would be the point if your app ends up looking like it does now?
You really need to think about how to layout your app in a modern way. Perhaps you could keep your tabs for the different cases, but replace the multiple tabs in each child window with a master/detail view, much like Dev Studio does for its Options dialog?
We had this same dilemma, we decided on screen tabs at the bottom with tabs that relate to that screen at the top - and contextual ribbon items.
The tabs in the screens actually just scroll the window to the desired point so all information is sectioned off and available on each screen by scrolling or clicking the tab at the top.
Looks like this
Am looking to implement a detach and popup UI behaviour in my applcation.
It basically means that I will be displaying say, a stackpanel with lot elements on the right side of my page. And on a button click, I want the stackpanel part to popup(removing its allocated space in the UI) and should be able to move it above the underlying wpf UI.
What am trying to do is that remove the stackpanel from its parent grid on button click and add it as the child of wpf popup control. But I am facing some issues doing this way. However I just want to know whether I am doing it in the correct way or do anyone have a good alternative for implementing this pin out functionality am specified here?
Thanks,
Vinsdeon
How about using this kinda nice control, AvalonDock, which is simulating Visual Studio's dockable components behaviors?
http://avalondock.codeplex.com/
It will spare you the pain of developing such a specific functionality, and will have a great reusability anyway
I'm not too familiar with silverlight, so I'm pretty sure I am asking a basic question.
Is it possible to have a silverlight dropdown menu (like superfish, or so-called dhtml menus) in a web page that will ;
not use more space in the page than
the first level
will go over html content when we
expand it.
I guess that Silverlight has to be displayed inside a certain "canvas" like flash, so the silverlight menu has to be either :
as big as the fully expanded menu can
be -- with the possibility to display
html over it (using css?) and make
sure that the expanded items goes on
top of html ==> That seems not really
easy!
as small as the first level of menu
items -- means that silverlight has
to get out of the canvas to display
menu items ==> Is that even possible?
I know that this may sound ridiculous, but the project is to modernize the portal around sql server reporting services using silverlight in a sharepoint webpart. There's no possibility to change the setup, I just want to know if that could be achieved using silverlight. If it can't, we will fall back to superfish.
Thanks!
It is possible. Silverlight plugin should be set to windowless, so its content can overlap with html. Because Silverlight can not draw outside of its own surface you would have to make as large as biggest menu element or you could resize Silverlight container dynamically through javascript bridge.
I am working on a little WinForm app and have been trying to find the answers to a few questions i have without any luck. Im a ASP.NET developer so WinForms development is new to me.
Here is my main question:
How do I create a menu system that once selected the contents will render in the Main form of the selected item. If its a GridView I want to the GridView to render inside the main application so they can navigate away without having to deal with the modal popup. I do not want to popup forms unless i explicitly say so. I guess the equivalent to this would be using a Master page in ASP.NET.
Make sense?
The closest thing to Master pages in winforms would be MDI (multiple document interface), which is a hideous Windows 3.1-era abortion of a user interface. Why this option is even still around, and why anyone still uses it, is beyond me.
The second closest thing (and something more acceptable as a UI) is just to have one main form in your application, and implement the different pieces of functionality your app requires as separate user controls which are displayed on the form and hidden as the context requires.
A weirder method, but one that might also work for you, is to use forms inheritance - design one "master" form with the menus and controls that you want to always be present, and then have each form in your app inherit from that master form. This would not appear to the user to be much different from my second option above, so I wouldn't bother with it.
There really isn't anything similar to Master pages in WinForms.
The closest to what you want to use would be a TabControl selecting a different tab will display that tab over the other tabs. If you don't like the tab look you could extend the TabControl to not show the tabs or hack it together by placing the TabControl inside a panel just large enough to show the content but not the Tabs and change tabs programatically in your menu control.
I want to start creating an application that has a menu on the left(some items in a tree) and I want to open different pages on the right on the form when I click these items. Could anybody guide me in doing this correctly pls? I dont want to have tons of data in memory and just display these pages one in top of another.
Thanks
One approach is to have treeview docked on the left and a panel docked to fill. Then, on the SelectedNodeChanged event of the tree, you can load forms into the panel. Just be sure to clear out the old form every time you change nodes.
By pages, do you mean web pages? If so, take a look at the WebBrowser control.