2 sided winform Tree - exist? - winforms

I'm looking for a 2 sided winform Tree control. something like what you see in the math books. meaning that the tree can go both right and left in the control.
Something like http://www.math.bas.bg/~nkirov/2010/NETB201/slides/ch06/pic3.jpg
Thanks
Avi

You can possibly create a control for yourself deriving from the treeview and doing all the styling in the derived control. But I am sure it will be tedious thing. If you need to just show some data, in that case you can think of using SVG (its an XML inside) so that you can change data as you wish. Otherwise, think of WPF.

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WPF Custom Control with Databinding

I'm looking to create a custom control which represents a hand.
This at needs to be bound to a datasource, then if a value/index value is present in the datasource which is representing a particular finger, the finger in question should appear green.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to start of with such control?
Basically I'm creating an app which records which fingers people where their rings and how many.
So graphics on each finger will show Green plus a number showing how many.
Rough Hand Design for User Control
Any help or direction will be mostly appreciative.
I'd recommend a usercontrol rather than custom control for this. As I think that link Clemens posted says, unless you really are going to switch out the template of the control then you don't need to do a custom control - which would be harder than a usercontrol.
This will have at least one dependency property you're going to bind your collection to. Make that an ObservableCollection. You can then pass say 0,1,0,2,0. If people change the rings they wear super dynamically you can set one of the collection to itself to cover change notification to the control.
Inside this I'd put a viewbox with a canvas in it.
Grab an outline of a hand from somewhere. You want to get a geometry out of this so look for a svg preferably.
Maybe https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/stop-hand-silhouette_57659
Then download and install InkScape.
Use this to trace bitmap if that's all you have then save as > xaml.
Open that file in notepad and you'll see a path with a set of sort of co-ordinates. Grab those. These can be used to define a geometry you use as a resource or directly used as the Data to a path.
I use such a resource for the email "icon" in this:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/32610.wpf-layout-lab.aspx
Or you could probably use one of the hand icons from syncfusion's metro studio ( free ) https://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/metrostudio
A Path can be used for your hand.
You then want 5 itemscontrols for your thumbs and fingers.
You could maybe make each of them a usercontrol as well but I'd try 5 controls for a first iteration.
They should template each item they're given into a green rectangle defined in itemtemplate.
Position 5 of them to taste on your hand's digits.
Bind their itemssources by index to your collection and use a converter to return the number of objects specified by that. So if it's 3 then you generate three objects.
That viewbox is there to scale everything. So you can size your control however you like and the rings will stay on the fingers.

Rotating windows in WPF

I need to create a WPF application which is maximized and which rotates amongst about 10 different screens. Each screen will take the entire area and show different content.
I already know how to maximize the window with
My question is what is best to put inside that window to achieve what I want?
Ideally I'd be able to have 10 different .xaml files and I just load one after the other to take the entire screen. I'm not sure the best approach for accomplishing this in WPF.
Thank you!
One quick way to do this is to use WPF's built in page navigation. By making your root window a NavigationWindow and each view a class derived from Page (similar to work with to a UserControl or Window) you can just set the NavigationWindow.Source to a relative URI that points to the page you want to show (like a web browser) and simply switch it as needed.
This sounds like a classic MVVM application, which is simply too much to put into detail here. Google MVVM or Model-View-ViewModel, or pick up the book Advanced MVVM by Josh Smith (widely regarded as an expert in such things).
However, this is basically what you are going to have:
One class, the ViewModel, is an abstraction of the data that you need to bind to
Your data Model
A View for each thing you want to show. A View is simply something that holds your UI, be it a DataTemplate or a UserControl. Each View is bound to the ViewModel
The Views are the things that will "rotate" (although rotate in WPF implies animation and/or transformation). How you switch between them is up to you, although it sounds almost like something that would be done with a DispatcherTimer and animation (i.e. like fading between pictures in a slideshow).
This question is really too broad for this forum - you will need to do quite a bit of research on WPF fundamentals before proceeding. Again, MVVM is a good direction to start.
EDIT: Something More Lowbrow, per OP Request
This is probably as simple was you can make it (and still create separate XAML files for each piece of content):
First, create 10 UserControls (XAML files) for the stuff you want to show.
Next, add an instance of each of these user controls to your main window. Set the Visibility of each of these to Collapsed, except the first one to show.
Put a "Next" button on the main window.
In the code-behind, handle the Click event for the Next button. In there, keep track of which UserControl is visible, by name. Set the one that is currently visible to Visibility.Collapsed, and set the next one that is supposed to be visible to Visibility.Visible.
This is certainly an ugly solution, and not very WPF-ish, but it will get the job done.

Silverlight TreeGrid/TreeList functionality

I have a requirement for a "Tree grid" or "Tree list" control.
This is something that looks like a DataGrid, but the left hand side is a tree that can be expanded and collapsed to show different rows (typically grouped, or perhaps showing data from a heirarchy).
Has anyone tried to build something like this by hand? If so do you recommend that route?
Or am I better of buying the control? If so who sells a good one?
We are targetting Silverlight 4 if that makes a difference
UPDATE: This is the type of control I am looking for (but for SL obviously)
This article looks promising. He uses a DataGrid with a custom data source and cell template. This is the only example I have found so far that actually ends up looking like a DataGrid (because it is one).
Telerik has a CTP of a TreeListView control, but it definitely looks more like a list than a data grid.
Also see this similar question also on StackOverflow.

Should I be using Expression Blend to design really dynamic UIs?

My company's product is, at its core, a framework for developing metadata-driven UIs. I don't know how to characterize it less succinctly than that, and hope I won't need to for purposes of this question, but we'll see.
I've been trying to come up to speed on WPF, and have been building UI prototypes here and there, and recently I decided to see if I could use Expression Blend to help with the design of these UIs. And I'm pretty mystified at this point.
It appears to me as though Expresssion Blend is designed with the expectation that you already know all of the objects that are going to be present in the UI at design time. But our program generates these object dynamically at runtime.
For instance, a data row might be presented in a horizontal StackPanel containing alternating TextBlocks (for captions) and TextBoxes (for data fields). The number of these objects depends on metadata about the number of columns in the data row. I can, pretty readily, write code that runs through a metadata record and populates a StackPanel dynamically, setting up the binding of all of the controls to properties in either the data or metadata. (A TextBox's Width might be bound to metadata, while its Text is bound to data.)
But I can't even begin to figure out how to do something like this in Expression Blend. I can manually create all these controls, so that I have a set of controls that I can apply styles to and work out the visual design of the app, but it's really a pain to do this.
I can write code that goes through my data model and emits XAML for all these controls, I suppose, and then copy and paste it. But I'm going to feel really stupid if it turns out there a way to do this sort of thing in Expression Blend and I've dropped back and punted because I'm too dim to figure out the right way to think of it.
Is this enough information for someone to try formulating an answer?
I think expression blend is a very good choice ESPECIALLY if you want to design dynamic, datadriven UIs. You can use Blend to desgin DataTemplates that define how a single dataobject is to be presented to the screen. For example, if you have an object of type Person you can define the controls like textboxes, border etc. that then are to be generated automatically for each Person in your list.
You can then fill your ItemsControls (DataGrid, ListView, TreeView ...) with those dynamic databojects and WPF knows how to render them. If a Persopn is removed form the list, the generated visual item will be removed too. This is just a simple example the whole notion of dynamic data is deeply baked into WPF and you can access these features using blend.
To be able to design the datatemplates in expression blend you need to provide sample designtime data.
Also to be effective with all this it is of high advantage if you stick with the MVVM design.

Dynamic control creation in WPF

I'm working on a project where I have some hierarchical data that I want to be able edit through a fancy WPF control.
The data structure is essentially an expression tree. Each node can be a different Expression type but inheriting from the same base class. These different types need to have their own way of editing them.
My thoughts are that I would use the WPF TreeView control and then dynamically add editor controls for each type of Expression. I have only a basic understanding of WPF's data binding and the MVVM pattern so I'm not sure if this is possible to do or even where to begin. Any pointers or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
It sounds like what you're looking for is the HierarchicalDataTemplate class.

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