I'm trying to size a checkboxlist control to 500,250 from its current 502,251 (It's an OCD thing) but every time I try, it just reverts to 502,251.
Is it because the parent container is docked in the window? Are there any workarounds?
(This is through the visual designer)
Most likely the control is being resized due to the control's font size. The ListControl does not like to display an item that will be "split" by the bottom edge, so it will resize the height. Try changing the control's font size and adjust again to verify.
No work around, and you really do not what one, because the control is really doing the right thing.
Yes, it is OCD. I have it also, but this one you have to let go. :O) Consider yourself lucky because you are only one or two pixels off. I was five pixels off once, and I had to put a note on my monitor to ignore it. It so bothered me.
Related
Alright, try as I might, I cannot for the life of me get rid of this tiny little border around my buttons.
Edit: I should mention, in case I didn't make it clear, these are buttons with an image on them, set to flat with the button sized to the image.
Images below:
Number one, I can't for the life of me get these borders to GO AWAY. I've checked everything I can think of. They're:
flat
border 0
no margins
no padding
manually sized to the size of the image (75px)
in a table layout where the columns are all:
manually sized to the width of the image (75px)
borderless
Nothing seems to really "work" to get rid of these. If I size the columns down to be 74px instead of 75px, most of them go away, but a few remain. I've triple and quadruple checked the images, and they don't have anything that I can pick up on that should be causing this... no transparency around the borders, definitely no border that looks like that.
Which leads me to the second problem:
Settings button when dialog is small...
Settings button when dialog is stretched out.
Settings button is also in the same table layout panel.
I've checked all the settings on the table layout panel as well.. I can't find any padding or margin or anything settings that suggest this should be happening.
Does anyone have any experience with this? What am I missing..?
Simple solution: using directly a PictureBox as if it was a button. You can change your image on mouse over or mouse click.
Have you tried a Toolbar/strip/whatever it's called these days? Probably not going to help as I believe it pads on your behalf, but worth a shot.
In the end you can toss the buttons in the trash and write your own control. A single control that manages N buttons will work well here.
I don't understand your second problem. What's the problem? It'll be fixed if you roll your own control anyhow.
While not a fix for the spacing issue, as a workaround you can make that gray gradient currently "behind" the "tabs" and control panel image into a BackgroundImage for the TableLayoutPanel using BackgroundImageLayout of Stretch. While not fixing the spacing issue, it would make it unnoticeable.
Writing a winforms control has its challenges (experience speaking here). I would agree that that is whats needed however. Depending on your project you may consider using XAML and WPF. It provides that fine detail you seem to be looking for in you application.
There are ways to host XAML controls in a winform app, but if you went this route it would be best to create a native WPF application. The reverse is also true (winform controls in a WPF app).
Did you check if the image has transparent pixels around the graphic pixels you want?
May be a simple crop solution.
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 WPF window that contains a fancy image with roughly 200 controls (derived from buttons), all of which use one of my 5 templates (paths, shadow effects, etc). Agreed, it is a heavy window to draw. I can live with that.
My problem comes from resizing the window. Maximize/Restore take about 1-2 seconds, but manually dragging the bottom-left corner causes the system to hang for about 5-10 seconds. In that delay, the window is black & contains partial leftovers until the final result is shown. It looks amateurish and that, I can't live with.
Remote connection : using a remote account, I found that the window resize always takes 1-2 seconds, but doesn't draw the "intermediate" stages while I'm dragging the window borders. The result is as snappy as I would expect.
My conclusion is this: It's the redraws during the resize that are bottlenecks.
The inevitable question is this : how can I prevent redrawing the window until the resize is finished?
Thanks in advance for any ideas...
#Seb: I'm beginning to think WPF is
not designed for interfaces that go
beyond 2-3 controls at a time
Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend should be good counterexamples. Though Visual Studio sometimes freezes the bottleneck is definitely not in the WPF rendering.
#Seb: The inevitable question is this : how
can I prevent redrawing the window
until the resize is finished?
Simply set the window's content visibility to Visibility.Collapsed before the resize/maximize and make it visible afterwards. Though I think you asked the wrong question. Here is the right one
How to make my controls measure/arrange extremely fast?
And to answer it you should take a look at your code. Maybe you intensively use dependency properties in the measuring/arrange algorithm? Or maybe you picked wrong panels (e.g. Grid is slower than Canvas)? Or maybe... I stop guessing here :).
By the way, it's always better to launch your app under profiler and prove the bottleneck rather than assuming the place where it might be. Check Eqatec Profiler it's free yet powerful enough. VS 2010 also offers nice profiling features, though it's far from being free. And you may want to check WPF Performance Suite.
Hope this helps.
Let me know how this works... I am assuming that your root visual item is stretching to horizontally and vertically to fill your window with auto height/width. Get rid of the Auto height/width. On app start up set the dimensions of the root element. There is a FrameworkElements have a size changed event. Register for this on your Application.Current.MainWindow (maybe be a typo, that was from memory). Whenever this event fires, start a timer with a small interval. If you get another resize while the timer is running, ignore it and reset the timer. Once the timer fires, you now know the new size the user desires and that they have (at least for a short period) stopped resizing the window.
Hope that helps!
From Ragepotato's answer and your comment about needing to see roughly what the interface would look like while resizing, as long as you don't have your objects dynamically re-locating themselves (like a Wrap Panel) - you could take a screenshot of the window contents and fill your frame with it.
Set it to stretch both height and width, and you'd get a (slightly fuzzy) idea of what a particular size would be. It wouldn't be live while resizing, but for those few seconds that probably wouldn't matter..
Given a WPF Application running full screen, a fair amount of controls some of which will animate from off screen to center. I was wondering if there are any special ways to save on the amount of time required to optimize an application for different screen resolutions?
For example, using Blend I've setup some text, which is originally off screen to scroll into view. Now in design mode the start positions are static. If resolution changes the start positions will obviously not be correct.
So I guess to correct this, during app startup. I need to
Check resolution
Move the text box to the desired start location
Adjust the storyboard as required, so the frames all have correct co-ordinates depending on the res of the screen.
I don't mind doing all of this, but if there is an easier way please share!
Thanks
In WPF layout of controls should be made in such way, that when size of window or content changes, controls automaticaly resize/reposition themselves to reflect this change.
This is highly affected how your layout is made, especialy by using specific panels, that do layout of their child elements.
This is also made obvious by using device-independent units for sizes, margins and sometimes positions of controls. And also allows different kind of zooming and scaling of whole UI without any need to redesign the whole thing.
If you are trying to position your controls absolutely, either by using Canvas panel or margins, your are doing it totaly wrong.
In WPF, scene is measured in abstract units, not pixels, and controls are freely scaled. There should be no problems to center something, or what?
I have a custom canvas that I can drop controls on, move, and resize. I need to be able to at least start with a pre-determined size but then allow re-sizing.
My problem is that I have a user control that doesn't appear to resize. I set Height and Width on the user control (works on drop). But then as the control is resized on the canvas the visual size stays the same (the sizing handles are changing). I can see the Height property changing (usercontrol.height) as the control is resized. But again, the appearance of the control stays the same size.
I had a thought that the inner container on the user control should be bound to the usercontrol.height but that didn't seem to help. (or maybe I didn't have the binding right).
On the same canvas, if the dropped control is for example, an Image control, I can set an explicit height on the drop and everything resizes as it should. So it seems to be UserControl thing.
So is there something special I need to do with UserControls to get the visuals to resize? Should I be using explicit height and width to get it all started?
Thanks for any help.
The WPF layout system can be confusing, as you've discovered. There is no substitute for a solid understanding of the layout and measurement system. If you plan on doing much WPF development, it's worth taking 20 minutes to read this article on the layout system and then experimenting for a while in an iterative environment such as Kaxaml until you feel comfortable.
The system is very logical. It won't take long for the penny to drop. Sorry for the indirect answer, but I don't believe there's enough information in your question to really explain what's going on.
You might also look at the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment properties.
Not a WPF expert but I believe you need to enable auto-sizing in order to achieve the scenario you are looking for. This is done by setting the Height/Width of a control to Double.NaN which essentially says, "I have no specific size". Once you do that, the control should resize to occupy available space based on the need of the control.