I'm a developer who's trying to get the hang of Blend. I've always used Blend to mess with control templates and such, but I'm trying to get the hang of using it for basic UI design, since I figure it's probably a bit faster than typing the XAML up manually in Visual Studio.
Right now I'm just trying to create a basic Grid, but I'm seeing two default behaviors that I'm hoping someone can show me how to change.
1) When I hover my mouse outside of the design surface, I see the temporary yellow line to show up, where the new Grid Column / Row will be when I click. The problem is that the newly created rows are set to heights like 0.2297* How do I get Blend to attach regular heights, like 250?
2) Ignoring 1), once I have some rows and columns, when I drag a button, or combo box, etc, onto one of the cells, it drops it exactly where I release the mouse, while adding some large margins to position it there. Is it possible to tell blend to just drop the control into the cell, and leave the margins alone?
Grids are awesome but it takes a bit of play to get proficient at working with them in Blend. Here are some tips to get you started (I cover this in detail in chapter 4 of my book).
1) When you use the snap lines to create rows and columns Blend automatically makes them relative (Star) sized, which is the behavior you are seeing. To change the row/column style to fixed (Pixel) sizes, click on the Padlock icons to the left and top of the desired rows and columns. Then, either edit the values in XAML or you can click near (but not on) the padlock to select the row or column. This will open the sizing properties in the Properties panel.
2) The short answer is "No". Blend will always add Margins when you draw the element in a cell unless you take care to draw them to the borders. This is too difficult and time consuming, so I just make sure I draw it somewhere inside my target cell. Now I can right-click the element and select "Auto Size > Fill" and the element will fill up the cell: no Margins, Width and Height set to Auto, and Horizontal and Vertical Alignments set to Stretch. [FWIW, addressing this is my number one feature request for Blend.]
I hope this helps.
To answer point 1) Blend is creating proportional grids so that the columns remain the same relative widths when you grow or shrink the grid rather than absolute grids. So if you want absolute grid widths you'll have to go in and edit the values by hand.
I find that it's easier to create the basic form in Blend and then tweak the values in the text editor - either in Visual Studio or Blend itself.
As for point 2) I've just tried this and as long as I click inside the column/row on the grid when placing a button it adds it to the correct column/row of the grid as expected. Select the button and then just double click inside the grid - this should add a button of default size where you clicked, but in the grid. (It would be much easier if I could see what you were doing).
Related
Beginner in Visual Studio here.
I'm trying to create an C# Windows Form application that simply displays a form to show some information about the local system.
I have created this form with the help of the VS designer:
As you can see, it consists of a simple panel with a PictureBox at the top, a label below it (both centered), three table layouts next to each other, and a button at the bottom. Never mind the label texts.
The rows of all the table layouts are set to absolute, this is because I want to programatically add rows to the end middle and right table layout if there are more than one local IP address in the computer and setting the rows to auto size or percentage would make alignment difficult if more rows are added.
Now, my problem is that I can't figure out how to make the form resize and move the controls (specifically move the 'OK' button down) when more rows are added.
I have tried anchoring the button to the bottom edge of the form as well as the bottom of the middle table, both produce the same result: the button stays where it is and the new rows overlap it, like this
I would also like to know how to have the form resize to fit the contents of the labels. For example, if the text in one of the labels inside the layout is bigger than the column width, I'd like to have the form grow to accommodate it. Likewise, I'd like the form to shrink to fit the largest text.
I realize that this may not be the most efficient or easiest way to create this particular form, but it is what I've come up with, I of course welcome any suggestions in that regard. It is important to maintain alignment between the rows of all table layouts.
Thanks in advance.
Use a data grid and add controls to it if an add button is pressed. You can scroll through the rows so you won't need to adjust the height of the form
I'm creating a trial project wherein my window has two grids, left grid is sort of a table that has labels and textboxes each row and asks for a specific part of the invoice like item, name, address stuff like that and the right grid is to show a preview of the invoice that the left side is creating.
I thought about using a document viewer on the right side but I thought that anything I open there would be static and if I put values on the textboxes on the left grid, it wouldn't matter since I opened a standalone document to view on the right grid.
I thought about just creating a table out of the right grid and have the default values and populate the other ones when a user types something on the textbox and make it function as the preview but then I don't know how would I go about and printing it and also, it has about 45 rows which I couldn't fit in the grid without it being unreadable (because I had to cram 45 rows of data inside that small grid)
So is there a tool in the toolbox that could potentially create a interact-able grid? I tried the grid control but I can't seem to only make it show 4 columns because that's all I need, I don't want it to show E and the rest of the alphabet because I want it to resize accordingly with only 4 columns to make it more readable.
Oh and I also have devexpress installed so you guys could also recommend something I can use from there. Thank You.
I think this is the best solution since it does what I wanted it to do.
I created a scroll view and placed a grid inside it then set the length accordingly to show it in a reasonable size and let the scroll bar do its magic for me to see the rest of the grid without compromises of the content's size.
I'm sort-of just nit picking here, but maybe there's a simple solution which will save me some time.
When I'm drawing my Winforms GUI in the designer, controls snap to certain points. I can align the baseline of the text of one control to that of another, I can align the left and/or top of one control to another, etc. This is all great.
What's great too, is that the controls snap to other controls spaced with their margins. This means that if I'm making a vertical array of TextBoxes, then I can have them equidistant in my GUI - it looks less messy.
However not everything snaps correctly, or at all. Say I have put in my TextBoxes and now I wish to reduce the width of my form so that there is no white space between the edges of the TextBoxes and the edge of the form. Additionally, I want the distance between the edge of the TextBoxes and the edge of the Form to be the same on the left as it is on the right. If I drag the right edge of the form to the left, towards the TextBoxes it will not snap. I'm left with either calculations to work out what the width should be, or a juggling act to gradually reduce the width until the TextBox is snapping to both the left of the right.
I'm not saying this process is particularly difficult or time consuming. It's just that if it were to snap, the whole process would be infinitely easier.
Is there a built-in option in VS2010, or perhaps an extension? Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong in the first place?
The snap lines in the designer work perfectly when moving or resizing any of the built-in controls. The only time that they don't work is when you are resizing the form itself.
I agree that it would be extremely convenient to have snap lines here, as well. I wish I knew of a way to enable this. But unfortunately, I don't believe that there is one.
The workarounds are either to calculate the proper size mathematically, or guess at resizing the form then check your work by dragging one of the controls (and using the snap lines that appear). I go through the same "juggling act" that you describe on an unfortunately regular basis.
Whenever a control needs to be positioned so that it "snaps" to a form edge I usually move (or resize) the controls to the correct size first, and then change the controls "Anchor" property of those controls to be anchored to the corresponding form edge (even if the form itself won't be allowed to resize).
That way whenever I resize the form, the controls position relative to that form remains the same, simply resizing or moving the control as required (depending on the Anchor property chosen).
I completely agree that the ability to "snap" the form to controls when resizing the form would be extremely useful, but its normally possible to work-around using the anchor property in this way - the times when its doesn't work (such as when a form consists entirely of a column of text-boxes is a fixed height), I'm afraid you need to resort to calculations, but I find that most of my dialogs are resizable.
I have a Silverlight datagrid with custom code that allows for +/- buttons on the lefthand side and can display a table with a tree structure. The +/- buttons are bound to a IsExpanded property on my ViewModelRows, as I call them. The visibility of rows is bound to an IsVisible property on the ViewModelRows which is determined based on whether or not all of the parent rows are expanded. Straightforward enough.
This code works fine in that if I scroll up and down the grid with PageUp/PageDown or the arrow keys, all the right rows are hidden and everything has the right structure and I can play with the +/- buttons to my hearts content. However, the vertical scroll bar on the right hand side, although it starts off the correct size and it scrolls through the rows smoothly, when I collapse rows and then re-expand them, doesn't go back to its correct size. The scrollbar can still usually be moved around to scroll through the whole collection, but because it is too big, once the bar moves to the bottom, there are still more rows to go through and it sort of jerkily shoots all the way down to the bottom or sometimes fails to scroll at all. This is pretty hard to describe so I included a screenshot with the black lines drawn on to show the difference in scrollbar length even though the two grids have the same number of rows expanded.
I think this might be a bug related to the way the Datagrid does virtualization of rows. It seems to me like it isn't properly keeping track of how tall each row is supposed to be when expansion states change. Is there a way to programmatically "poke" (read hack) it to recalculate its scrollbar size on LoadingRow or something ugly like that? I'd include a code sample but there's 2 c# files and 1 xaml file so I wanted to see if anyone else has heard of this sort of issue before I try to make it reproducible in a self-contained way. Once again, scrolling with the arrow keys works fine so I'm pretty sure the underlying logic and binding is working, there's just some issue with the row height not being calculated properly.
Since I'm a new user, it won't let me use image tags so here's the link to a picture of the problem:
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/8760/messedupscrollbars.png
This is a known issue according to what I read today (and is apparently still an issue in the as-yet-unreleased Silverlight 4):
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/153997/343790.aspx
I have a dialog with column down the right side filled with buttons. The dialog is built with Windows Forms. I have a mockup at the following link:original dialog
(I would have included it but apparently i'm not allowed to use image tags)
I would like for the buttons in the right column to resize themselves to fill the remaining vertical space when the dialog resizes. It doesn't particularly matter to me whether or not buttons simply increase in size or whether the buttons remain the same size while the gaps between them increase. I'm simply want the buttons to go from the top to the bottom. (I have a mockup for this as well but apparenlty i can only include one link)
I've tried hosting the buttons in a FlowLayoutPanel but they do not increase as the dialog stretches, I only get whitespace at the bottom after I run out of buttons. I also tried a TableLayoutPanel and had the same result but I may have misused it. Does anyone have any ideas how I could accomplish this?
Thanks in advance,
Jeremy
To get you started. Use the TableLayoutPanel, set its Anchor property to top, bottom, left, and right. Set the rows and columns to percentages as needed. I suggest each control have it own cell. Note that each control in a "cell" can have its Dock and Anchor property set as needed.
You can do this with a TableLayoutPanel. Create a column for the buttons, with each button having it's own row / cell in the column. Set each row to be an even percentage for height (if there are 10 buttons, each row would be 10%), and dock the TableLayoutPanel to the right side of the screen. Then, put the buttons into their rows and set them to full docking. Then, when the dialog expands, the TableLayoutPanel will expand to fill the entire right side of the screen, each row will adjust proportionally, and each button would expand to fit the new row size.
You may have to adjust this a bit to fit your needs, especially in how it relates to the other content in the window.