Windows Forms User Control not painting well in WPF application - wpf

So, this is the issue:
I have a Windows Forms User Control that I placed in main Window of my WPF application. I override paint method of User Control. It paints ok in "ideal" case. But, after showing the control in main window, I added MessageBox. This is the code snippet:
board = new BoggleBoard(Boggle.CurrentGame.Size);
boardHost.Child = board;
MessageBox.Show("You have " + time + " seconds to find as many words as you can. Click OK when you are ready to play);
If I don't show MessageBox, everything is ok. But with the code above, after MessageBox is shown, my control is painted, but just like boardHost (Windows Form Host) has lower opacity, so I get dark area around the control. I say "like" cause I tried with
boardHost.Opacity = 1;
but it doesn't help, I still get the same thing.
What might cause this problem?

Here is a screenshot. As obvious, the dark area around the board should not be there. And it is not visible if I don't show MessageBox after it is drawn.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/RZs2W.png

Related

ImageViewer in WPF

Hi everyone I would like to implement an ImageViewer (like the one in Facebook for example) in a WPF application
I already have a ListBox whith my pictures, it works well. But I would like to add pop "image full size" when the user double click on one of them. (something like in FB, with a fade out of the background etc).
Currently I'm thinking of to use a Window...Do you have a better idea of what I should use ?
i would probably use a window for that as well. Then you can easily put an opacity animation when the window loads to give it the fade in and fade out effect
You could also use a Popup control.
It comes with some some built in (but very limited) animations, like fade, see PopupAnimation.
I'd try that and if it doesn't fit your needs, I second bflosabre91 oppionion and would use a separate opacity animated window.
But bear in mind that with an additional window you could have negative side effects e.g always sync the window positions correctly, handle task switches (ie. correctly hide the window in the taskbar/tasklist)

Winforms semi-transparent PNG over semi-transparent PNG

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).

How to make label transparent without any flickering at load time

I have a panel and on that I've a picturebox. There are around 20 labels that I've to show in the panel. I want the background of Label to be transparent ie the image in picturebox is shown and the label displays only the text.
Now since labels do not exhibit true transparency I made the labels child of picturebox
this.lbl1.Parent = pictureBox1;
This has solved my immediate problem but now when the form loads, all the labels take a while to become visible and do so one at a time. I'd appreciate if you guys can give some solution for this.
Thanks in advance
The standard cure for flicker is double-buffering. But that cannot solve this kind of flicker. It is a different kind, caused by having multiple windows overlapping each other. Each label is its own window. When the form needs to paint itself, it draws its background leaving holes for the child windows. Each child window then takes a turn drawing itself. And their child windows draw themselves next. Etcetera.
This becomes noticeable when one control takes a while to draw, no doubt your picture box. Especially when it displays a large image that needs to be resized. The holes for the child windows stay unpainted while the picture box draws. They have a white background, black when you use the form's TransparencyKey or Opacity property. This can contrast badly with the image in your picture box, that effect is perceived by the user as flicker.
One immediate cure is to not use controls so you don't pay for their window. A Label is very convenient but it is a massive waste of system resources to burn up a window just to display a string. You can simply implement the picture box' Paint event and draw the strings with TextRenderer.DrawText(). PictureBox has double-buffering turned on by default so the image as well as the text is drawn completely smoothly, no more flicker. The obvious disadvantage is that you lose the convenience of point-and-click, you have to write code.
There are other fixes possible. One of them is to prevent the picture box from leaving holes for the child windows. It will draw the entire image, the labels pop on top of them. That's still flicker but not nearly as noticeable. Add a new class to your project and paste this code:
using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
internal class MyPictureBox : PictureBox {
protected override CreateParams CreateParams {
get {
var parms = base.CreateParams;
parms.Style &= ~0x02000000; // Turn off WS_CLIPCHILDREN
return parms;
}
}
}
Compile and drop the new picture box control from the top of the toolbox onto your form.
Yet another possible workaround is to make the form and all of its children double-buffered. This doesn't speed up the painting at all but all of the windows get rendered into a memory buffer, the result is blitted to the screen. You'll notice a delay but the window suddenly pops on the screen. This is called compositing. Winforms doesn't support this directly since it can have side-effects but it is easy to enable. Paste this code into your form class:
protected override CreateParams CreateParams {
get {
CreateParams cp = base.CreateParams;
cp.ExStyle |= 0x02000000; // Turn on WS_EX_COMPOSITED
return cp;
}
}
Supported by XP and later. Watch out for painting artifacts.
or you can ditch the labels and draw the text yourself:
private void pictureBox1_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e)
{
TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, "Label1", SystemFonts.DefaultFont,
new Point(10, 10), Color.Black, Color.Empty);
}
The label does not support transparency, you must create your own unique custom control, you can see these code examples.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/transparent_controls_net.aspx http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vb/uLabelX.aspx
Bye

childWindow Full Screen Event tweak the Parent to also FullSCreen Mode

I have a ChildWindow which contains a ExpressionMediaPlayer inside it. When I click on the ChildWindow Media Player Full screen button it swiches the whole application to FullScreen Mode.
Is there a way to avoid it. I am not quite sure if this scenario is going to fall under SL security restrictions.
When I drag the ChildWindow(the position of ChildWindow changes) and click on the fullscreen
now the ChildWindow also changes it's position.
For example if I have dragged the ChildWindow 50px from Top and pressed the Full Screen button of of mediaPlayer (it contains) the Child Window also appears 50 pixels below the Screen Top.
But I want My ChildWindow to be FullScreen without having any Gap from LEFT,TOP,RIGHT or below.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Subhen
Silverlight only uses one of its two windows. The first is the normal window embedded in the Host application such as IE (or in windowless mode it co-operates with the host to draw directly on one of the host's windows in a give rectangle). The other window is a Fullscreen one.
When in full screen mode it moves all its rendering of its stack of content to the full screen window. You can't get Silverlight to render only some controls on the Fullscreen window, its an all or nothing proposition.
Creating a "fullscreenable" ChildWindow would be an interesting exercise. Probably a new templated control based on Childwindow with a new "Fullscreen" visual state (in a new state group) that hides the chrome and causes the content grid to stretch with Auto Width and Height.

Silverlight Tutorial Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Detail Scenarios - How to gray out background?

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.

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