does exist any WPF ribbon control (commercial or not) that support full re-templating? Generally they have a number of built-in graphic themes but do not allow graphic redesign from scratch. Thanks in advance!
Even IF you would find one - there is a reason they do not allow full redesign, and that is that the Ribbon is legally protected by microsoft and you are only allowed to change the behavior that far. If you install, for example, the Ribbon support from Infragistics, you have to accept a separate license with Microsoft limiting what you can do.
So, the full styling support is missing for a good legal reason. Even a good technical one - I can understand MS putting some screws on developers to make sure Ribbon applications do behave "correctly" across applications.
I find Teleriks ribbon control was pretty good. I am not sure if it supports full re-templating although it does say it allows flexible styling?
I have also used Actipro's ribbon control in the past but found it a bit tedious.
Related
I've spent some time working on WinForm user and custom controls. However, in the back of my mind are the increasingly loud voices saying that WinForm technology is obsolete, and that WPF is the future on the desktop.
I've only looked superficially at WPF. Can anyone comment about if WinForm user controls can be used at all on WPF, and how different WinForm user controls are from WPF user controls?
Most of the controls I'm working on do some type of owner-draw as opposed to child controls being dropped onto the control. I'm just wondering how much of this code will be reusable under WPF.
It is certainly possible to use WinForms controls in a WPF application using the WindowsFormHost control. As usual, there are a few caveats. In particular, the two control types don't overlap well.
However, doing so seems that it would prevent you from taking advantage of many (if not nearly all) of the benefits of switching to WPF in the first place. If you have a large code base that's working for you, I'm not sure why you feel you need to migrate. There will always be something newer that comes along. The real battle is figuring out whether it's really better, at least for your particular situation.
Mandatory disclaimer: I'm far from an expert on WPF and apparently quite a bit less jaded on WinForms than many developers are. So perhaps my advice should be taken with a grain of salt, but I think it's worth considering nevertheless.
Your controls will be reusable (through WindowsFormHost, as Cody suggested). However, I'd not bank on being able to port your code across to WPF. The fundamental programming model is quite different (WPF relies heavily on data binding and thus benefits from very different code-behind), as is the rendering model (WPF doesn't use GDI+). The best way to approach most controls in WPF is to use the built-in templating; other than custom layout panels (which isn't really "drawing"), I've found nothing so far that requires custom draw methods in controls.
It'd certainly be a waste to create a WPF application just to host your WinForms controls. WPF may (or may not!) be "the future" but that doesn't mean you should throw away what you've got on a whim.
You say you've only looked superficially. If you think it might be worth investment, why not do an R&D project to prove how the integration might work on a small part of the system?
I've been playing with WPF for some months now, and I quite like it.
But one of the things I don't get is why MS doesn't put a little more effort in helping developers by supplying basic controls, and I need to get this off my chest :)
For example, I figure most applications somewhere will need to let you edit some properties - for configuration or whatever.
What would be the most used types in a proprety-grid editor ?
text
numbers (byte, float/double, int, etc)
colors
....etc.
So why isn't there even something as simple as a control to edit numbers ? Like a generic NumericUpDown control that allows you to type in numbers (no text, no pasting invalid input) or spin them up/down according to some given rules (decimal, floating point, min/maxvalue) ?
Why isn't there a generic colorpicker, so people get the same user-experience in every application ?
Why isn't there a standard implementation of a SearchTextBox, a BreadCrumb-control, or all these other standard control types users have gotten accustomed to the last 10 years ?
(..but at least they DID have the time to implement a generic splashscreen - because everyone knows that greatly increases user-productivity....)
The well-known ideal is always to give people the same user-experience over different applications. So even if some of those controls would be easy to make - it would be preferred to have one version over different applications.
I see people all over the internet trying to do the same stuff over and over again.
Okay, so MS started a WPF Toolkit project on Codeplex that tries to implement some controls, but only did so half-heartedly and is completely dead by now (last update of the roadmap dates back to Mar 21 2009).
The result of this is that a lot of people starting a WPF-project end up spending a lot of time on trying to figure out how to create some generic controls and get really frustrated.
Wasn't the mantra "Developers, developers, developers!" ..?
/Rant
Because its ridiculously easy to make these in WPF. With WPF and silverlight microsoft's focus is on a core framework that makes many tasks (such as stylable controls) dead simple. Tools are more important than prebuilt controls. They are focusing on the NEXT thing rather than a better Winforms.
I think Microsoft - and some people responding here - are forgetting about the most important part of this post :
"The well-known ideal is always to give people the same user-experience over different applications. So even if some of those controls would be easy to make - it would be preferred to have one version over different applications"
Just Google Image Search on "WPF Color Picker" ( http://www.google.nl/images?q=wpf+color+picker ) and you'll see this idea go down the drain.
That's exactly what i thought at the beginning with WPF..
But afterall, a NumericUpDown is easily created with a cutom usercontrol, same for all the controls you will ever need, you can create it by yourself in (almost) no time, or grab some implementation googling around, and then you can still customize
I think they provided the very basic implementations for the UI elements and leaved all the custom stuff to developers and who need custom stuff, if they would have done a generic color picker, maybe it wouldn't have had all the functionalities that anyone would ever need
There are a lot of 3rd party vendors out there that provide powerful custom controls (editor, navigation, grids, menus, property grids, ...).
It's - in general - cheaper to buy from them than to rewrite your own (when it fits your need of course).
Historically, Microsoft has always encouraged a rich "component-based" eco-system around what they provider out-of-the-box features. This has been true from the beginning of component programming (VBX, OCX, ...) with Microsoft technology. This is arguable, but that's the strategy :-)
Which library to use for WPF?
Infragistics
ComponentOne
SyncFusions
ActiProSoftware
Telerik
#Reed - None of the Syncfusion WPF controls were ported from Windows Forms. With the grid control, most vendors use a simple ItemsControl based architecture. We have a much more elaborate infrastructure for highly optimized cell oriented rendering. This was implemented to achieve performance as close to Windows Forms performance as possible. The effort on our end to deliver this solution when contrasted with a pure ItemsControl based approach was at least 5x. We have a lot of customers using our Windows Forms controls in real-time scenarios and we wanted to give them the ability to move over to WPF without losing on the performance front. Our key controls offer excellent rendering performance even with millions of data points in direct contrast to solutions that are based on a simple ItemsControl based approach. Our controls often have a steeper adoption curve than others but in the long term we do believe that they are easier to maintain and update. Just my two cents:) Also, we are really keen to work with you on any issues that you are running into. Please let us know. My email is danielj(at)syncfusion.com.
#Tom - If you can send us feedback on the gauge we would greatly appreciate it. We are always looking for ways to improve and your feedback will be really useful.
Ultimately it depends on what you need. I think Syncfusion offers the widest and most actively deployed control suite on the WPF front. Disclaimer - I work for Syncfusion.
I work for a large firm which has long-term license agreement with Syncfusion so I had to use their products for years in pain.
I agree with Reed for Syncfusion's model. They converted their Winforms model (which has major bugs) to look it like WPF, I believe the whole suite is nothing to do with WPF, most of their controls cannot be controlled in XAML, you need to use code behind in order to style even simple things.
They are actually improving this to look more like WPF however with Syncfusion one issue is when you upgrade to a new version, it always breaks previous version based code. It is their marketing strategy and you spend weeks to figure out the new system.
One other issue with Syncfusion is they have quite poor documentation, their support is very weak, so you need to discover things on your own.
I used Telerik WPF in one project which is a much better choice, the performance is much better and the model is really easy to maintain.
We just started to buy DevExpress due to the pain of Syncfusion over years and I believe this is quite good WPF product. It is easy to use, they have really good support and nice documentation. The controls look very professional. First time I feel like I am using actual commercial .NET toolset.
*I do not work for DevExpress or Telerik.
They all have advantages and disadvantages.
Personally, I've found Telerik and Infragistics seemed more like they were designed specifically with WPF in mind.
Syncfusion's offering is more of a port of their Windows Forms product, so the design is more like they're other product lines.
That being said, each product you listed is good - and each have their own feature set. There is no substitute for trying a demo and seeing how you like working with the products in question.
I'm a fan of Component One, mainly based on personal taste.
ActiProSoftware have some good controls, but I find that they don't expose enough properties to make it easy to style and customize, though you can get around this with implicit styles.
Xceed have my favourite Grid control, lots of cool features and easy to work with.
I don't particularly like Telerik and I've never tried SyncFusion.
I would love to try Infragistics as that is one that I haven't tried, but have been really impressed with the demos. Does anyone have any comments on the architecture of Infragistics?
Like Reed said, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but from my experiences I would recommend Component One.
HTH
None of the above, just use WPF Toolkit for DataGrid and VisualStateManager. It is not that hard to style the controls in WPF/Blend, plus it makes YOU more proficient and your code leaner.
P.S. Though, you might still use third-party reporting, since there no built in support for reporting in WPF.
If you are looking for a WPF Control Library there is the WpfDynamicUI Library.
It is an open source control building the user interface for the DataContext you provide.
It supports Charting, DataGrid, Map, Filtering, Paging, Nesting views and more...
Can be an alternative for building Line Of Business application.
PS: I am the coordinator of WpfDynamicUI
Well we are considering to move from WinForms to WPF, what pitfalls does WPF have? And we got component one's flexgrid is there any wpf grid that has the same functions? one nice thing with it is that you can implement your own draw method for the cells... It can merge cells print and save to many file formats..
In general, WPF development is very different from WinForms. You should expect it will take some time to learn the new technology (or you might even need to hire new developers =)).
WPF approach is in many ways better than WinForms' one: check out styles and triggers, data binding, control templating, eventing model.
I would recommend you to start exploring it, but wait for the WPF 4 (and the boring MSDN page) to start the actual migration, because it is going to be even better and close some of the very annoying gaps.
First of all, WPF works pretty different from Windows Forms and likely requires a different approach on how to structure and design the application. At least it works way better if you do it the way it was conceived.
As for single Windows Forms controls, this shouldn't be a problem. There is a WindowsFormsHost which enables you to include Windows Forms controls in WPF.
The change from winforms to WPF is not a change I'd reccommend unless you have specific requirements which WPF fulfills - WPF is not intended to be a replacement, simply an alternative which is more suited towards graphically rich applications.
If you do have a specific requirement then you also might want to consider embedding WPF controls into winforms applications, rather than converting your entire application.
The learning curve is slow to get going, but once you get the idea it all starts to make sense. We have "Pro WPF in C# 2008" book floating round the office and its been a great help. Of course most things get googled to find an answer, but to find out why something is done the way it is this book was a great hope - to me anyway.
There are some annoying features but its still WPF is still quite new. Like most things, if you come across a problem someone has likely come across it before and there is an answer out there!!
J
Take a look here for a datagrid: http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117
The main hurdle with WPF is simply the huge amount of new stuff to learn (if you wish to use it properly). I'd think twice if you're on a tight schedule, but it might be worth it if you have 6 months to spare...
Speaking from just my experience, moving from Windows Forms to WPF took some re-learning. A few months into the transition most changes made total sense. WPF removes much of the frustration associated with using Windows Forms. It allows for a truly rich UI development experience especially when working in tandem with designers. I strongly recommend WPF Illustrated by Daniel Solis as a learning aid.
With reference to the grid, Syncfusion offers a WPF grid control that implements the features you have asked for. It implements true virtual mode with cell level customization, printing and export to multiple formats including Excel. Disclaimer - I work for Syncfusion.
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.