Develop Reference

In a property grid is there a way to unselect all grid elements programatically?

I am working on a project in which I am using a property grid to display the properties of the selected control.
The Property Grid is fixed to the left edge of the container and in the rest of the space I have the form I am designing.
On clicking a control on the form, the specific control’s property is getting selected.
In the above figure, I have selected the textbox and the textbox’s properties get shown on the propertygrid.
Here if you observe, by default, the Name property is highlighted as well.
Is there some way to unselect this property programmatically?
I have tried some suggestions online but none have helped. I am not able to find find a way to remove all selections from the PropertyGrid, but its behaviour seem to be different form a DataGrid...
Here is why I need this...
On selecting a control, if a property in the property grid is selected, then the property is getting modified.
For example, If i cut the control using Ctrl + X, the selected value in property grid is getting cut which in some cases is forcing user to set the property before modifying anything on the form.
I have tried selecting multiple controls, but in that case alse the selected property seems to be persistent

Since PropertyGrid uses DefaultProperty to select a property in its grid, as an option you can set DefaultProperty attribute at run-time for your object to a non-browsable property, for example:
this.propertyGrid1.SelectedObject = null;
TypeDescriptor.AddAttributes(someControl,
new Attribute[] { new DefaultPropertyAttribute("Site") });
this.propertyGrid1.SelectedObject = someControl;

Well, what you are trying are hacks. It is never a good idea to do such hacks particularly if you are not the only person that use the software.
In your case, the focus should be on the designer while you interact with it. So if the user press Ctrl+X, the designer should respond to the keyboard and it should not have any effect on the property grid (as only one control can have the focus at the same time).
Thus it is up to you to make sure that your designer is focusable, that it has the focus when initially displayed, that it get the focus when you press the TAB key. Pressing the TAB key again should put the focus on the property grid so that user can interact with the grid without using the keyboard.
If you have more than these 2 controls, then obviously TAB should also stop at any appropriate controls. Also, it can be a good idea to have some direct shortcuts like F4 to (show and) activate the properties pane.
If you are not able to make it works, then the best compromise would be to use another windows for the properties grid. By using a distinct Tool windows for the properties, it should not respond to the keyboard when the main windows has the focus.
Here are some links that might help you:
Panel not getting focus
Control.Focus Method() — See Remarks section.
In any case, you should not prevent Ctrl+X to works as expected when the property grid has the focus and a property is selected. Users don't like software that do not follows UI conventions.
As a software developer, you should as much as possible ensure that your application follows standard behaviors. I recommend you that you take one or 2 extra days developing your software properly instead of doing hacks.
Often, compromise to gain a few days will never be fix and will be a pain for many years. Better to do it right from the start. Unselecting an item in the property grid is not an acceptable workaround. Your manager should not allows you to do that.

Winforms UI Dynamically Displaying Parts

I came across a tutorial and some example code for an audio converter. You select the format you want to convert to from a drop down, and when you do all sorts of options appear in a previously blank area, different options based on the format you choose. It's called Audio Converter .NET and is from same author as Audio CD Ripper .NET. I can't find the tutorial, but here is a screenshot.
See how on the right there is extra controls that are not on the left. I was experimenting trying to add another category. I added it to the dropdown, but am unsure how to make it so certain fields come up when it is selected.
I understand that they create those controls for those items, but I don't see how they call the correct one when the combo box selects something. I see controls are created, but if I try to duplicate the controls into another entry in the combo box they don't show up for either the new or old one I was duplicating from.
What's the best way to go about achieving something like this?
Thanks

The easiest way is to create the controls needed for every option in the dropdown inside a panel, and simply turn it's visibility property from false to true whenever it's corresponding option is selected using the combobox's SelectedIndexChanged event handler. (And don't forget to turn the current visible panel's visibility to false)

How to make something similar to Visual C# 2008 properties window?

What interests me is everything below the bar with buttons that determine how the properties are displayed. All I can figure out is there is a splitter and a status strip.
What I'm after is how there are 2 sections which I want to add the titles Property and Value, the sections can be resized with a splitter (I assume a splitter is used in this case), each property can be selected and the corresponding description appears on the status strip, and each value can either be text or a dropdown box.
The coding part I can probably do by myself, what I need to know is what controls the window is made up of and how it's put together.

You are referring to the PropertyGrid control. It's in the ToolBox.
See Getting the Most Out of the .NET Framework PropertyGrid Control

This is the PropertyGrid, and can be used directly. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here...

ListBox with pop-out/popup item details

I would like to create a listbox, with a details pop-up/tooltip kind of window.
Scenario is as following:
List of items
Show details of selected item
Details should be displayed outside the listbox and overlaying any controls that happens to be nearby.
The problem about using tooltips is that they disappear after a while. And the problem about using pop-ups is that they do not move, when the window moves (?)
So I'm just looking for some pointers on how to solve this.

Use ToolTip object. It has autopositioning and nice graphical style out of the box.
Simply use it like this:
toolTip.PlacementTarget = yourSelectedItem;
toolTip.Placement = PlacementMode.Right;
toolTip.Content = {place whatever you need to display here};
You can control its visibility with the IsOpen property.

Adorners were built for things like these.
That said, if I were doing this I would set "StaysOpen" on a Popup to false. So when the user clicks somewhere else it will automatically disappear (ie when window is moved). Do you really see your users moving the window so often while looking at the details? Going down the adorners route is not all that easy. It has its own complications.

.NET Is it possible to have a contextmenu on an item of a combobox?

In my application I have dropdown list with several items. I'd like to show a context menu when the user clicks the right mouse button on a dropdown item. Is this possible? And if it is possible, how?

It is possible but not easy. The ComboBox dropdown is a native ListBox that is created on-the-fly. To get the handle of that list box, you have to send the CB_GETCOMBOBOXINFO message in the DropDown event. Check my answer in this thread to find out how to do this.
The iceberg that is likely to sink that Titanic is that the dropdown automatically closes as soon as it loses focus. Which will happen as soon as you display the context menu. Nothing you can do about that.
Consider a different approach, you could use an actual ListBox that you make visible when the user clicks a glyph that looks like an arrow next a TextBox.

Not possible easily. No hover or right-click event messages are being sent when the combobox is expanded.
You can see this is the case when using Spy++.
I think the easiest would be to change to a listbox if your scenario allows you to do that.

As Wim said in his post, there's not a direct way to do this because the messages you want aren't fired.
As a comprise, you could try setting DropdownStyle=Simple; on the Combo and
shrink the scroll region to show a single line:
http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/1695/49557147.jpg
If you assign the Combo a context menu, it will open when the scroll region is right-clicked. You'd probably have to figure out what item was right-clicked. But as other have said, this doesn't sound like a standard Windows way or an intuitive use.
Or how about a modal dialog that you could bring up from the Combo's context menu? On the dialog, you could have a list that the user could select from and a Delete button to delete the selected item(s).

Since MenuItem doesn't have a ContextMenu property it isn't as easy as it is with many other controls. You'll probably need to capture the right-click event and then position and show the context menu manually.
Two caveats though:
The combobox list will close when the
list loses focus, so it may close
when the context menu is shown
leaving the user unclear as to what
they clicked on (not 100% sure on
this, since I haven't written the
code to test.)
More importantly though I would argue
that this is a poor UI choice, I
can't think of any real world
applications I've used that have
context menus on menu items, so it
wouldn't be very discoverable for the
end user. Plus context menus should
be just for quick access, they
shouldn't be the only way to access
functionality. Are you going to be
able to expose these functions
through other means as well as the right-click menu?

You could do it manually, by capturing the event on the form, but consider making a nested menu instead. If your combobox items have menus of their own, combobox probably isn't the right choice.

For those asking "Why?" or saying they've never seen a combobox with a contextmenu; Look at any web browser's favorites dropdown. You can right click and delete, edit, or go to the entry in current tab, new tab, or new window.
I also could not get an actual contextmenustrip to show, so I made a menu with a small borderless form and call with:
Private Sub FavoritesBar_SelectedIndexChanged(sender As System.Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles FavoritesBar.SelectedIndexChanged
FavIndex = FavoritesBar.SelectedIndex 'FavIndex is declared as a public string.
Dim Loc As Point = New Point(MousePosition)
FavMenu.Location = Loc
FavMenu.ShowDialog()
End Sub
With a homemade contextmenu, be sure to add "me.close" at the end of each sub as well as the me.mouseleave event.