I want to setup my WinForm to look like the Delphi7 IDE. Basically that means the window has no background (the desktop shows through), and child windows float around.
Here's a sample image:
I can handle the floating windows, but how would I go for the main window (the menu bar and the toolbar)? What are the WinForm properties required to get this layout? I can't seem to be able to get rid of the window's client area.
Thank you
Why can't you get rid of the client area? Just resize the main form so that it's as thin as you can make it.
You may be implementing the floating windows as UserControls in the main form's Controls collection. If so, there are two ways you can deal with this:
Implement the floating windows as actual windows. Show them using "frmToolWindows.Show(this);" (this will keep them always on top of your main form).
If you need to keep the floaters as UserControls, you can make the client area of your main form transparent by setting the form's TransparencyKey property to some arbitrary color (Color.Red, for example) and then setting the form's BackColor property to the same color. This will make your form transparent and able to be clicked through.
Please don't make a UI like this. It is very non-standard, and doesn't gain anything in the realm of usability. You could simplify things by keeping it all in one window like Visual Studio.
Related
I'm trying to create popout windows (like the dockable panes in Visual Studio). I need to create splitter controls to allow resizing of the controls when they're attached. I'm basing my design around the MFC docking panes and I'm trying not to hardcode docking regions.
Ideally I'd not like to have a fixed amount of sliders that are created hidden, but rather a variable amount depending on the location of each attached window. My current thoughts:
Use SubtractRect() to subtract the RECT of the attached window from that of the effective client area.
Create a slider for each edge of the control that is not on the edge of the main window's effective client area.
However when using CreateWindow() ideally a control ID would be passed in which is usually hard-coded in Resource.h, which then makes dynamic creation of controls tricky. Not to mention recalculating window sizes based on the location of the slider(s).
I'd thought about allocating an ID range to use for dynamic controls so I could start off with #define IDC_SPLITTER1 100 for example, then increment from this value for each splitter created. I've seen _APS_NEXT_RESOURCE_VALUE mentioned which I believe is used in MFC, but only for the IDE?
Sorry if this question is a bit wish-washy, I'm really struggling to get my head around this.
Thanks.
I have a project which requires that consists of two user controls, A and B.
User Control A (UC-A) appears in the background, the most distant
component of my window.
User Control B (UC-B) appears in the
foreground, overlaying User Control A. UC-B is partially transparent.
As is common with many UI designs currently (as of Aug. '18), I want it that UC-B causes the all elements behind it to blur (and only the elements behind it), as per the mocked up image here:
Please note, this mockup is not designed to imply that the picture of the sea shore is the Windows desktop, it was simply the first image I came across on my PC. The sea shore picture is representative of UC-A, and the panel labelled "My Panel" is representative of UC-B.
I know that it is very easy to apply a blur effect to an element and all of its children, but how can achieve the effect below, whereby the background is only blurred where the panel exists?
Please keep in mind that these are separate User Controls.
Windows already has functionality to do something similar on a Window level, but I can't see how to do it on a WPF UserControl level.
I have come across this answer, but this doesn't work for me as I am using different user controls. This answer was the closest one to my problem that I could find.
It seems you can do this with vanilla WPF with a bit of work, but far easier, this great library exists which handles exactly this scenario!
I have inherited a large MFC application which contains a CComboBox subclass that overrides OnPaint. Currently it does all its drawing by hand (with lines and rectangles), and renders a combo box that looks decidedly Windows 98-style. However, it otherwise works great and provides a lot of useful custom functionality that we rely on, and rewriting the entire control is probably not an option.
I would like to modernize it so that the OnPaint draws in Aero style where available (falling back to the old code when modern theming is unavailable). I've done this with some other custom controls we have, like buttons, and it works great for our purposes. I know there are some tiny behaviors that it won't get right, like gentle highlights on mouse-hover, but that's not a big deal for this app.
I have access to the CVisualStylesXP ckass, so I've already got the infrastructure to make calls like OpenThemeData, GetThemeColor or DrawThemeBackground pretty easily (via LoadLibrary so we don't force Vista as a min-system). Unfortunately, I don't know the proper sequence of calls to get a nice looking combo box with the theme-appropriate border and drop-down button.
Anyone know what to do here?
Honestly, I don't know why they originally tried to override OnPaint. Is there a good reason? I'm thinking that at least 99% of the time you are just going to want to override the drawing of the items in the ComboBox. For that, you can override DrawItem, MeasureItem, and CompareItem in a derived combo box to get the functionality you want. In that case, the OS will draw the non-user content specific to each OS correctly.
I think you best shot without diving in the depth of xp theming and various system metrics is take a look at this project: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/2584/AdvComboBox-Version-2-1
Check the OnPaint of the CAdvComboBox class - there is a full implementation of the control repainting including xp theme related issues.
Not sure if it's the same situation - but when I faced this problem (in my case with subclassed CButtons), solving it only required changing the control declaration to a pointer and creating the control dynamically.
Let's assume that your subclassed control is called CComboBoxExt.
Where you had
CComboBoxExt m_cComboBoxExt;
You'll now have
CComboBoxExt* m_pcComboBoxExt;
And on the OnInitDialog of the window where the control is placed, you create it using
m_pcComboBoxExt = new CComboBoxExt();
m_pcComboBoxExt->Create(...)
Since this is now a pointer, don't forget to call DestroyWindow() and delete the pointer on termination.
This solved my particular problem - if your control is declared in the same way, consider giving it a try.
I need to create some mini-windows, like the ones shown in the image bellow, in my winform main form.
It would be nice if they could be draggable, resizable, and, mainly, closable.
How can I approach this design? Has anybody already seen some control (with code available) implementing something similar?
alt text http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/5765/imagea.png
A normal Form works fine for this. Set its FormBorderStyle to either FixedToolWindow or SizableToolWindow as desired.
If you want to keep your floating windows inside your main window, use MDI (Multiple Document Interface). Here is a tutorial (Google can find you many more).
Have you tried just setting the FormBorderStyle property to SizeableToolWindow?
Is that what you're after?
You can create them as resizable and draggable custom controls.
You could use my example at:
http://hourlyapps.blogspot.com/2008/07/resizable-and-movable-controls-c-net.html
In order to make a convenient UI for an .Net 2.0 Winforms application I am working on, I have need for a control that I'm pretty sure goes beyond the "out of the box" behavior of any standard control. A mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve follows:
Mock up http://www.claware.com/images/temp/mockup.png
Essentially, this part of the application attempts to parse words into syllables from tribal languages (no dictionary to refer to; any and all unicode characters are possible.) By the time the user gets this far, he has already defined the vowels / consonants in his language and some other configuration. There is then an iterative process of (1) the application guesses which syllables exist in the language based on some rules, (2) the user refines the guesses, selecting the correct parsings or manually parsing a word, (3) the application "learns" from the user's feedback and makes smarter guesses, (4) repeat until the data is "good enough" to move on.
The control needs to present each word (the grey headers), then all the syllable break guesses (the white areas with dots separating the parts of words.) There is also a way to manually enter a parsing, which will display a text area and save button (at the bottom of the mockup.) When the user hovers over a guess, the background changes and "accept / reject" buttons appear. Clicking on the accept, or entering a manual parsing, removes the entire word from the list. Clicking the reject button removes just that item.
I'm by no means 100% sold on the formatting I have above, but I think you can get a general idea of the types of formatting and functional control I need. The control will also scroll vertically--there may be thousands of words initially.
My question for you experienced WinForms developers is: where to start? I would really, really like to stay within the .Net core framework and extend an existing control as opposed to a third-party control. (At the risk of starting a religious war: yes, I suffer from NIH-syndrome, but it's a conscious decision based on a lot of quick-fix solutions but long-term problems with 3rd party controls.) Where can I get the most "bang for my bucK" and the least reinventing the wheel? ListView? ListBox? ScrollableControl? Do I need to go all the way back to Control and paint everything manually? I appreciate any help that could be provided!
[Edit] Thanks everyone for the ideas. It seems like the most elegant solution for my purposes is to create a custom control consisting of a FlowLayoutPanel and a VScrollBar. The FlowLayoutPanel can contain instances of the custom controls used for each word. But the FlowLayoutPanel is virtual, i.e. it only contains those instances which are visible (and some "just out of scroll"). The VScrollBar events determine what needs to be loaded. A bit of code to write, but isn't too bad and seems to work well.
I would look at the TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel controls. These will let you organize a series of controls with moderate ease in a vertical fashion. I would then create a UserControl that consists of a label and 2 buttons. The UserControl will expose properties like Text and events that are exposed for the button clicks.. For each entry in the list, you will create an instance of the UserControl, assign the text value, and handle the click events. The instance will be placed in the Table/Flow panel in the correct order. Both of those layout panels do allow for inserting items between other items so you can add/remove items from the list dynamically.
Edit:
Given the length of what you are trying to render, I would consider using the DataGridView and do some custom rendering to make it perform how you want it to work. Using the rendering events of the DGV you can merge columns, change background colors (like highlighting the dark gray lines), turn on/off the buttons, and handle changing the grid into edit mode for your rows to allow modification or inserting of new values. This method would easily handle large datasets and you could bind directly to them very easily.
Well, this certainly looks like a candidate for a custom component that you should be creating yourself. You can create this using standard .Net drawing commands along with a text-box, and a regular button control.
Now you want to find out where to start.
Create a Windows Forms Control Library project.
Drop in the textbox and the button control.
The panel drawing code should preferably be done by code. This can be done using the regular GDI+ commands.
Edit:
Here's another idea, and one that I've practically used in my own project with great success.
You could use a web-browser control in the app, and show your data as html. You could update the source of the web-browser control based on the input in the textbox, and clicking on the links in the web browser control will give you the event that you can trap to do some action. Your CSS will work.
I used this technique to build the 'desktop' in an app I made called 'Correct Accounting Software'. People loved the desktop so much that it is one of the best loved features of the app.
Here's how I would do it:
Create a custom control. In this custom control, have a ListBox atop a LinkButton, and when the LinkButton is clicked you can make it give way to a TextBox. The ListBoxes will have the top row unselectable... you can probably get the rest from there. When you get your list of words, fill a Scrollable of some kind with one control for each word:
(foreach String word in words){
myScrollable.add(new MyComponent(word));
}
From there, I'm not sure what you want to do with the boxes or the data, but that's my initial idea on the UI setup.
Use the WebBrowser control and generate the HTML markup into it using DocumentStream or DocumentText.