Pardon me, if it is a silly question.
Can you anyone tell me how the WinForms are rendered (the background mechanism)
Also how is WPF Form are rendered.
In simple, i want to know the rendering mechanism of WinForms and WPF Forms.
For WPF there is the WPF Rendering Overview or WPF Rendering Steps which states
Render all children.
Process OpacityMask.
Process Opacity
BitmapEffect
Clip geometry
GuidelineSet
Transforms
Windows Forms renders its Forms using GDI+, while WPF renders its Windows using DirectX.
Related
Here's what I am trying to accomplish - To create an MDI application in WPF, which can host child web applications. I am using WPF webbrowser control to render web applications. WPF inherently doesn't seem to support MDI applications, so after a bit of searching, I found this project, which uses UI controls to simulate windows and manages them inside a WPF canvas. This approach seems to work reasonably well until I start adding webbrowser control object as an MDI child.
When I add webbrowser control as an MDI child, it always appears on top of other WPF elements including other MDI child controls (as shown below). From what I understand, webbrowser control always appears on top of any other WPF object except for window (and popup). Assuming that's true, I think I need to use actual WPF window to avoid overlapping issue.
The only solution i can think of right now is to wrap WPF window inside an HwndHost object and then add that as an MDI child. However it appears that a child window cannot have title bar. That means that i need to have a window that has a dummy title bar area (just like actual window title bar) and actual content area (which will show webbrowser control) as shown below (Red border is HwndHost object).
This approach seems to solve the overlapping issue. The next thing i need to try is to let users click on the dummy title bar and drag the MDI window inside the canvas element.
Questions -
Is my understanding about WPF webbrowser control overlapping behavior right? If not, what am i missing?
Is the second approach a step in right direction for accomplishing what i want? If yes, how do i implement the drag behavior for HwndHost?
Is there any other alternate solution i can try?
Note:
Although many consider MDI not an elegant solution, I do not have a choice. (We tried alternate solutions like tabbed windows/dockable
windows, but were not well received)
I am quite new to interop programming, and do not understand the
concepts well. Please correct me if i am misunderstanding things.
Thanks!
Can someone explain to me how a SlimDx viewport would work in WPF?
Assuming one could render an image using SlimDX to a D3DImage and then used that D3DImage as a source for a WPF image, does that imply that the original image would first have to be rendered in SlimDX and then subsequently also be rendered in WPF? ie Are there two rendering process that must be completed?
If so does that mean that any speed advantages of using SlimDX rendering be negated because it would have to go through the WPF rendering rendering process as well?
Or am I just not understanding the process?
We have an application which is using winforms. Now we want to upgrade it.
We are planning to use some WPF forms and some old winforms. and we also need to use MDI.
From MDIParent we need to open both winforms and WPF forms. And these forms need to be in tile format. I got to know that WPF doesn't support MDI.
Is there any other way to achieve this?
Using AvalonDock, can we display the forms in tiles format also. I know that it display in Dockable format.
why you want to upgrade your application to wpf and still use some of your old winforms and the mdi concept any further?(i dont like mixup both:))
for quick and dirty what about using your winform app and integrate wpf in it - if you want/have to?
EDIT:
if you want your WinForms in Wpf you can use
<WindowsFormsHost />
It should work with Avalon too. Here is an example for WindowsFormsHost.
Is it possible to use WPF in WinForms, to implement the idea used in this question. I am trying to create a semi-transparent panel.
Technically yes - there are ways of hosting WPF in WinForms using ElementHost.
However, you're likely to run into problems with the transparency. WPF's rendering is different to WinForms and, while you can make the WPF control transparent, the WinForms underneath aren't going to respect that.
You can use Opacity property of your WinForm to make it semitransparent.
Which technology (WPF or Winforms) should be used if UI supposed to be highly customizable like controls layout/design could be change by user and such sort of UI customization.
Kindly mention best practices along to achieve that...
I just recently developed a designer in both WinForms (company req) and WPF (to see how much better it was). WPF has a definate edge, especially when it comes to nicer looking controls and control transparency.
This was my first actual WPF project, other than just messing around, so I was learning as I went. I found this series on creating a diagram designer very helpful. I didn't really do the same things that this article talks about, but more of a hybrid between that and my WinForms app.
I have to admit that the UI functionality was up and running much faster in the WPF version than with the WinForms version.
WPF I have found the easiest to create controls on a fly. Because I can just attach them as child controls to the parent, and the Grids, Dock Panels, just make life easier.
I found WinForms to be clunky to always work with. However I come from a Web background and Xaml makes sense to me.
WPF controls are design and lookless. That means you have a default view of them, but everything detail of a WPF control can be overridden. It's almost akin to using CSS. In the WPF world, you do not create custom controls like you do in WinForms. The main thing in WPF world is "styling" controls and defining a style for them. It just happens that the style also controls the layout and the form of the controls.
WPF is FAR superior for designing and style of UI. Check out these two top WPF companies and tell me if this stuff is easy to do in WinForms:
Cynergy Systems: http://www.cynergysystems.com/
Thirteen23: http://www.thirteen23.com/