How can I add a button to my form - mobile

I can't find any button control to add to a form in my mobile application. It's a standard mobile application with mobile emulator 6.0.
How can I add a button?

Check out this code project article.

Perhaps the questioner can clarify, but there are two different SDKs for Windows Mobile 6: Standard (for phones without touchscreens), and Professional (for phones with touchscreens). In Standard, there is no button control as it is not supported.
However, custom controls are supported, and you can still create a button (IMHO it's needed, as you can still use one with a D-pad). Go here for an example on how to create one.

Related

my custom answer box not working like in the windows livecode

Hi Is there a way that my custom answer/ask box will appear the same on a smartphone? It was deployed on every screen on the phone and did not look like a computer (I used a substack)
Mobile phones OS are as a single stack, no way to show other stacks. So any answer dialogue is the OS standard style.
Otherwise ask to http://ekkotek.com/index.php/products/livecode-tools/wheelib
The developed custom gui for mobile.
In mobile systems, the stacks always occupy the entire screen space. So if you want to use a custom answer.
You must simulate a floating window using a group.
Try creating a group with all the substack controls you already have. Now instead of calling the substack, what you should do is show and hide the group.
Create a graph inside the group and before making this group visible, establish the rectangel of this graph to the rectangel of the current card. Then put your dialog window in the center and in this way you will have a floating and personalized window.

Silverlight OOB User Menu Control

Well ... at the risk of sounding like I really don't know anything about programming, I have a question about controls in Silverlight 5.
I have an OOB App that I am working with, but I need to add the User Menus (File, Edit, etc.) that are normally seen at the top of all apps. There used to be a control in VS (the Menu control) that was easily configurable. What is the control used to create the User Menus in Silverlight 5? The Context Menu is not what I am asking about. That is the right mouse click menu ... so that's not the answer ...
Please, understand my problem. It's been since Silverlight 2 since I worked in Silverlight. I appreciate any information you kind folks would be willing to provide.
There is no such thing available directly from Microsoft (meaning it's neither built-in or present in the Silverlight Toolkit).
You will have to use third-party controls such as DevExpress or Telerik.
EDIT: Some more advice in response to your comment.
Another possibility is to create UIs from scratch. There are two forms of UIs that I found inspiring lately, both of which don't use any ribbons or drop-down menues at all. The first is to use "Windows 8"-like dashboards instead of traditional menues, the other is the Windows Azure Management Portal (a web application).
I don't use traditional UI frameworks for menues myself, but mostly because I don't like those approaches and I'm picky with how user interfaces should work and look like.
But obviously you have to make a serious time investment to go new ways. And it will heavily depend on your application what approach makes sense.
Here's one simple approach that could work in a number of cases, I used it for a database application (I call it the Windows-Phone-7/8 approach):
The screen is divided into the "page" area and information bars. The information bars contain no menues, just who's logged on, a back-button, a home-button, and context-sensitive buttons depending on what's in the view. So basically it behaves like a web browser and you navigate through the app by clicking on "links" (buttons that take you elsewhere).
There's only one page area, so no windows and no popups. I've gone to the extreme of making even dialog windows to be pages.
Now you need menues. You do that with "dashboards", ie. pages that present some overview stuff and buttons that lead to the other areas of your application.
Although you could have action buttons like save or delete on the page itself, I put them in the bottom bar (but they are still dependent on the page your on) - that is exactly how it works in Windows Phone 7/8.
One last advice: The real effort is usually not in the menus anyway. Beside your application logic itself, it's a lot of little things like login screen, error handling and how to present error messages (look at the windows azure management portal for how they did that really nicely) and gracefully failing on session timeout. There's also a lot of nuisance on how you manage your data (ria-services, etc.).
So as long as you don't need fancy data grid grouping, rich-text edit or excel-like pivot controls, a toolkit might not help you as much as you'd hope - because they give you only the controls, not the entire UI.

User focus in multitouch environment

I am trying to create a multitouch application.
I have the hardware which will allow me to do this. On the software side I want to be able to have WPF textboxes, WPF web browsers, multiple focuses, multiple keyboards and multiple users at the same time.
From what I've seen, I can't be focused on two controls at the same time.
What is the Microsoft MultiTouch approach for this kind of job ?
The OS limitations are what they are (and don't appear to change in Win8): only one hWnd at a time can have focus.
Since you are using WPF though, everything within your application (with the exception of the WebBrowser control ActiveX widgets you may be using) is rendered within one big hWnd.
WPF 4 introduced native support for multitouch, including multi-touch capture. The APIs for this are many but pretty intuitive so I'll just say this... go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms590078.aspx and search within the page for all of the members with "Touch" in their name.
The catch however is that the controls shipping with WPF 4 don't work with the touch input events... you'll only be able to interact with one of those controls at a time. To take advantage of the multi-touch capture APIs, you'll have to create controls that are designed with it in mind. Fortunately, the Surface team at Microsoft has you covered on that... the "Surface 2.0 SDK" includes a suite of controls (usable on any Win7 machine, not just for Surface) that were built with this stuff in mind.
To create application with MultiTouch UI, use MultiTouch Framework in .Net
Go to http://multitouchvista.codeplex.com/

Touchscreen Windows 7 WPF

I have an app which I need to make accessible for Windows Touch. It is not a multi-touch application. I've looked at Microsoft's guidelines for touch applications which is interesting. There is one thing I am not clear on though, that is text input.
I would like a keyboard to appear when I click in a TextBox field. Is there a way to use the built-in on screen keyboard for this?
The first monitor I tested with was a Wacom. It is an older unit that uses a pen. It had some software that pulled up an on screen keyboard whenever I clicked in any text field (in any application). It was very handy. I thought this feature was using built-in Windows Tablet software because it didn't look like it came from a third party. A newer monitor I just purchased (Elo) does not have this feature though.
Answering my own question so it won't show up as unanswered any longer... From my comment above:
Looks like I've found the problem. The general purpose driver for the monitor wasn't installing it as a Tablet PC monitor. The Windows 7 only driver will provide a Tablet PC control panel settings. Now a keyboard shows up whenever I click in a TextBox field. The Windows XP compatible driver must have been using a legacy sub-system...

What is the best menu metaphor for silverlight line-of-business apps?

So I'm porting an application from WPF to Silverlight and I have realized that there is no standard Menu control.
So I look around and find some third-party controls that emulate the menu control, like this one at codeplex:
alt text http://www.deviantsart.com/upload/1adt6b3.png
But then I decided to take advantage of this situation and think of some new metaphors besides the standard menu we have been using since Windows 3.0, e.g. I like the following enabled/disabled buttons for a small number of choices, which also work well as a vertical stack, and will try to integrate a drop-down button idea to allow it to hold the number of nested choices that a standard menu control could hold:
alt text http://www.deviantsart.com/upload/1bbtg9l.png
What is the best application navigation menu metaphor you have seen or used in a Silverlight line-of-business application?
How about the Office Ribbon?
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/20/ribbon-control-for-silverlight.aspx
http://www.divelements.co.uk/net/controls/sandribbonsl/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.aspx
Personally, I like the style of Apple's CoverFlow.
You can load various screens in each of the CoverFlow "panels", show the Active panel in the center, and tightly pack the other panels to the left and right.
You gain the ability to allow the user to see their other panels while working on the active one...and you can add a little flair when the user switches between the panels.

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