Is it possible to to these kind of textbox in windows form ? If yes, How? and can you give me a reference of that in order to achieve this. I've been a front end developer before and it's easy to do on web. I think i'm not the only one who want to know these. Thank you
I think to a certain extent you can get above animations but it will not be fast or extremely customizable like WPF here are my recommendations:
Bunifu framework
Syncfusion
Unfortunately both these are paid frameworks. If I do find a stable free framework I will update this answer.
Also Please Read up on more at How good can Winforms make a UI look using free resources only?
Related
I am currently learning WPF framework; I have some past (not much though) experience with Winforms. One problem I've had in both is that the menubar does not look native. I've found a workaround in Winforms, but I haven't been able to find anything for WPF. I've not had this problem in other frameworks I've used, particularly Qt.
In many pics I've seen, it looks native enough in Windows 7, but not Windows 10. I included some pics.
How it currently looks:
How it should look:
Thanks in advance!
Edit
While I have not seen the possible duplicate link, I am aware of setting the foreground/background on WPF controls. That link doesn't really answer my question. I don't want to come up with my own style at this point; all I want to do is make controls look native.
If custom styling is the only way, that's fine, but if there is another way, that would be preferable.
Thanks!
I don't think there's a quick fix to get what you want. WPF renders using DirectX, allowing for much more flexibility in styling applications. A WPF app should render exactly the same way on any version of Windows - it will not automatically adopt a native look and feel (that was actually one of the main selling points of the technology in its early days).
While MS made the default styling somewhat close to Windows at the time of release (Vista, I think?), if you want WPF controls to have a particular look you're going to have to style them yourself.
I have seen some applications having such a rich layout that a person starts hating desktop applications like traditional c#.I was wondering how to make applications having GUI like this is it possible to make it in c#?
According to the title, this uses WPF, which can be used with C# and/or XAML. It can actually be used with any .NET language.
The problem is not the programming language. What you need is:
a UI framework that allows rich layouts (in C#, you'd use WPF),
and, even more important, a designer. With "designer", I mean a human, not a tool. If you look at your screenshot, you will notice that the colors of the background image match those of the buttons, that the buttons match the content circle, that the header of the content circle ("Getting Started") matches the header of the window.
So, really, this is not a matter of programming language. What you need is a design. Implementing it is the easy part (at least with technologies such as WPF).
Look at the window title... "Xceed DataGrid for WPF Recource Center". I might be going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that it was written using WPF and C#.
Only the developers know for sure! Okay, the window title gives it away
Quick guess, they're using Windows Presentation Foundation, which isn't a language, but part of the .NET Framework (starting with 3.0).
Adding some resources here . . .
You have to use WPF for that, and probably with some custom controls.
For WPF have a look here:
Wikipedia
MSDN
Expression Studio
For already made controls you can check:
Xceed
Infragistics
Devexpress
There are a lot more out there even a lot of free ones. All the above are commercial but i think they have a few free samples.
I can place a couple of buttons in Silverlight, but I'm not that experienced with the Silverlight tools and capabilities.
What do you think I should use to create something like this?
The control would have to pull and ID from the database and according to that place an image asociated with the record.
I need it to be animated with some crispy movement.
How can I achieve this?
It's all possible, but you need to break the task down into smaller steps.
Once you've done that you should find that you can solve some of these with your current knowledge, others will resolve themselves with a little more research, but there will be some you need to ask questions about here.
I'd suggest you start that break down and try to solve the little problems. Then if you get stuck come back and ask more specific questions.
Well, with Silverlight and c# you can make the animations needed and such, and you can set a Silverlight Image control with a data bound source, so it loads the images dynamically, but Silverlight can't talk with databases directly, you'll need to use a webservice to interact between Silverlight and the database. Don't know how much you know but to not leave anything out, with Expression Blend you can make the graphical part of you're app fast and easy, and with Visual Studio you'll add the code-behind and functionality.
In this link you can find a example of how to make an image slide show with Silverlight, it may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it should give you a heads start.
I am about to write a front end app, which will be used as a media center app. It will plug directly into a high definition TV. Essentially transforming my laptop into a media player. While this concept is not new, I want custom functionality, so this is why I am not reusing existing products.
I'm a C# developer, so the app should ideally be written in C#. And there is 1 other consideration, I need to accept input via the MCE Remote.
I was considering using Silverlight for this. Would you recommend this? Or any other recommendations for frameworks before I begin planning around this.
Thanks in advance.
This is the type of stuff that the Windows Presentation Foundation was meant for. You'll get a lot more access to the hardware than Silverlight would provide (I.E. that MCE remote you mentioned). You mark up your UI with vector graphics/XAML, and then perform the logic with C#.
EDIT: WPF also has support out of the box for animations which can make your UI a lot more interactive.
EDIT 2: Scott Hanselman has written a really cool application called BabySmash and posted the source online. It basically intercepts keyboard input and shows shapes and sounds on the computer. It's a good "child-proofing" method for your PC. The code could provide you with some insight into WPF and how to do the animations and interactivity that you're looking for.
Is this a desktop app? If so I would use WPF. Silverlight is a subset of WPF, so using WPF you could potentially do more.
Silverlight or WPF, if you want some extra power. Both have a similar programming model (with XAML and code-behind) so you might be able to start with Silverlight and move up to WPF if you need.
The VLC api might be useful for playing your media, someone has created a C# wrapper for it:
http://wiki.videolan.org/.Net_Interface_to_VLC
WPF is certainly the way to go, and for playing media check out the excellent WPF MediaKit: http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com/ I've used it successfully in many projects.
I'm using WINFORMS not WPF.
I just know basic c# .net gui programming. I donot want the traditional windows look. I want to have my own custom look (eg. gtalk, antivirus softwares, media players, google chrome).
Actually I'm inspired by google's PICASA software. Its awesome. I want to do something like that.How can I do that? If there is something I should learn please point me.
Also I may have to write my own custom controls (like modified tree view etc..) I guess. Please give some good learning resources.
This article describes how to draw custom windows. The author also shows how to draw non-rectangular windows.
If you could use WPF instead of Windows Forms, this is a good article about customizing window drawing:
http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_wpf/article.php/c16379/
There is also a question with some good answers here on SO:
Creating custom forms in WPF?
Update:
I think that skinning and custom drawing is fun to do from a programmers perspective, but I also think that there is almost no benefit for the user.
The creators of the platform you are developing for might have put a lot of effort into the design of their windowing toolkits.
If you just want to change some visual aspects of your application you also should take into account that you might miss some important other aspects of UI design:
consistency
accessibility
aesthetics (if you are overdoing
effects, gradients, ...)
internationalization
...
As you are developing for Windows, you also lose the skinning ability of the OS itself. And I think that some of the skins that come with newer versions of Windows are pretty good.
You can try any of the following:
telerik
Syncfusion
(source: componentsource.co.jp)
Or other components.
They do make your UI pretty.
Edit: if you want to study how they do it, you can buy the source code-- along with documentation and understand from there.
There are some commercial control libraries available.
I can recommend the Krypton Suite. It consists of the free Krypton Toolkit (which contains a lot of skinnable controls) and other non-free controls (Navigator, Ribbon, Docking, Workspace). It has some built-in palettes and renderers that allow you to make your UI look like Office 2010, Office 2007, Office 2003, ...
You want to look for +winforms +skinning. I haven't tried these, but the first hits don't look bad. Most decent skinning tools will be paid for.
From what you said, you want to develop your own custom controls. You have some frameworks for this like Qt which can use Direct3D for hardware accelerated graphics. It also have a Visual Studio plugin. There is a free LGPL version and a commercial version of it.
I remembered about Qt because you mentioned Picasa and as far as I remember, I heard the Picasa UI has been written through Qt.
You can try using "SetWindowRgn(..)" to set an arbitrary region for your window. This may range from giving a rounded rectangle shape to giving a weird looking shape to the form!
Check this out: Link.
There is another option if you are working in Vista(aero enabled), ie you can check out DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea(..) function here: link text
You can set the form's border style to 'none' and go on to create your custom form! You then might have to create custom buttons to carry out tasks like close, minimise, maximise etc. You might even need to write code for drag and drop events..
For the background, you might need to have a look at the gradient fills to give a great effect, otherwise you can use great looking pictures as Background..! But the latter option isnt good unless you have really good pic.