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How to rotate custom control in Windows Forms

I need to rotate my custom control in Windows Form using C# without using third-party libraries.
Don't want to either rotate the text or image of control instead actually need to entirely rotate control.

From here:Is it possible to rotate a button control in WinForms?
5 up vote accepted
You can't rotate controls. That's simply not supported by the native API controls that WinForms uses.
And one might wonder why it even should be supported. What could you possibly be trying to do that you'd need to rotate a button control? It would be much easier to draw it in a different place with a different shape in the first place, rather than trying to rotate an existing control. (Do note that you can also resize and reposition a control at run-time, if that would fit your needs. Investigate the Size and Location properties.)
The only workaround is to draw the control's image to a bitmap, hide the control, and draw the bitmap onto the form in the location you want it to appear. Of course, that won't result in a control that the user can interact with. They won't be able to click an image of a button, because it's not a real button. If that's acceptable to you, you should probably be using an image in the first place, rather than a button.

It is possible if you can get control of the painting, but you have to do a lot of the work yourself. Basically it all occurs on painting. A good example demonstrating how to do it is the Dock Panel Suite for WinForms.
In the VS2005AutoHideStrip (found here), there is a GetTransformedRectangle method that uses a System.Drawing.Drawing2D.Matrix class to rotate a rectangle.
It also sets the Transform property on the Graphics class, which will apply transformations automatically when you ask for something to be painted.
I advise reviewing this code for examples, it does it to draw docked tab strips down the sides of the page as opposed to top / bottom.
Some controls like TextBox are funny in that they borrow heavily from low-level Win32 libraries in their painting / behaviour, I've no idea if it is possible to get enough control to rotate this.

It is not possible to rotate controls. This is not supported by WinForms' controls API.
As you are dealing with a custom control, try simply redrawing it to suit your purposes.

I am pretty sure you can not perform this in windows forms at least not easily. However you can perform this in WPF and then bring WPF to your windows Form if you are looking for cool designs or even special effects to your controls.
This is FAR more easily done in WPF. In Windows Form, it's a huage pain to pull off.
Hope this help

Adding Transparent backgrounds to WindowsFormsHost Controls in WPF

I'm using the WindowsFormsHost to add a Windows Forms control in my WPF application, but I realise that WinForms controls cannot have transparent backgrounds without setting the style as in here How to: Give Your Control a Transparent Background. How would this be done in WPF?
BTW, I'm using C# and .net 4.0.
Thanks.

I don't think you can do this. The link you provided is really about being able to set the BackColor to Transparent. When that happens the WinForms control (in its paint background handling) gets the Parent Control and calls its PaintBackground and Paint methods. While your control will have a parent - the control that the WindowsFormsHost will create - that control will not and so there will be nothing to draw the background. In a Win32 world one might set the WS_EX_TRANSPARENT bit but that introduces all sorts of issues and I suspect it may not even work based on how WPF works. I would check out the MSDN topics (e.g. Technology Regions Overview and WindowsFormsHost interop) discussing the various air space issues with interop between WPF and other technologies.

Given a WPF Image control, is it possible to determine its HWND?

I am integrating a webcam in a WPF application. I can see the camera feed in the main window, as I pass its HANDLE on to the DirectShow functions. But this is not what I want.
The main form has a Image control, where I'd like to see the output. However, in order to do this, I need the control's Handle.
Any hint on how to do this?
Thanks in advance,
Gianluca.

An Image Control in WPF, unlike Windows Forms, doesn't actually have an HWND.
WPF works differently than Windows Forms - each control is not a wrapper around a native "window" with a handle, but rather composed together using Direct3D at runtime by the layout system.
If you need to actually host output from a Webcam inside of a WPF window, you should look at using HwndHost (or a subclass). The simplest way is often to just host a Windows Forms control inside of a WindowsFormsHost, though managing an HWND yourself via HwndHost is more efficient.

Using an WindowsFormsHost and a picture box inside is a good solution that I used for a similar problem where I needed a handle to display a video stream. But be careful, in order to work, the Window that is hosting the WindowsFormsHost control must have AllowsTransparency="false"!

Use winforms control with transparent background in MFC

all.
I'm writting a MFC App that use Winforms user controls in it.
I made a rounded control with c# and placed it on my MFC dialog using MFC-hosting technology.
But the control does not show its background transparently.
So, it looks very poor. I tried to set control properties related transparency but it's useless.
Who can help me to make my control pretty?
Best regards.

Can/how do you host a full VB6 Form in a C# WPF app?

I am currently exploring the option of porting some older VB6 application to WPF with C#. The plan, in phase one, is to port several key forms and not all the application. The theoretical goal is to open the VB6 form in a container of some sort within WPF via an ActiveX dll.
Is this even possible?
I've tried looking at the Interop and can't seem to find a solid example of how get it to work with anything but Win32 controls, not a full form. I have full access to the old VB6 code and can modify it in anyway needed.
The following screenshot of the main WPF app would serve as the wrapper/container:
http://www.evocommand.com/junk_delete_me/main_menu_mockup.png
The current VB6 maintenance screen that would be loaded in the “white space” section on the right side of the previous screen.

I was able to accomplish the task with the following steps:
Created a new VB6 Active X Control Project. Copied and pasted the entire contents of the VB6 form controls and code behind into the new control. There are several elements that have to be handled in switching to a control:
you lose the ability to display
the caption of the form in the
previous manner. You can work around
it with alternate controls
(label/borderlesstextbox, etc) that
accomplish the same functionality if
needed. This wasn’t a priority since
each screen was being hosted in a
browser like tab system in our new
.Net project.
All mousepointer references have to
be changed from Me.Mousepointer to
Screen.mousepointer
You cannot use Me.Hide and have to
alternate events to hide the .Net
container.
Any and all references to
Me.[anything] have to be removed or
replaced with UserControl.[anything]
if they are applicable.
If you use any functions that
reference a
[yourcontrol].Contianer.Property on a
form they will need to be altered to
loop through the UserControl.Controls
collection instead and “Container” is
invalid for vb6 ActiveX controls
All non-modal forms/dialog boxes
must be removed from the project as
there is now no Hwnd to handle in WPF.
You get an error of 'Non-modal forms
cannot be displayed in this host
application from an ActiveX DLL,
ActiveX Control, or Property page'.
In our case we had a simple splash
screen that would display when certain
long processes/reports displayed to
let the user know what was running.
I was unable to directly add the VB6 control via the interop to a WPF project . As such a new .Net “Windows Form Control Library” project was created. A reference to the VB6 OCX was added to the project. The VB6 Control s were then added to the .Net toolbox by “right click” –> “Add Item” and pointing a com reference to the VB6 control ocx. The .Net control was then used to host/serve the VB6 Control.
To display host a form in the VB6 and get it to fire the necessary initialization functionality the VB6 OCX controls were defaulted in a Visible.False manner so they were initially added to the .Net OCX as invisible controls. When needed the VB6 control is set to visible = True which fires the UserControl_Show() event. All code formerly in Form_Load() was moved to this event. The show event was the easiest method of accessing the Form_Load as needed. MSDN: “The control does not receive Show events if the form is hidden and then shown again, or if the form is minimized and then restored. The control’s window remains on the form during these operations, and its Visible property doesn’t change.”
Wrapping the vb6 controls within a .Net Winform control resolved the issue with Radio/Option buttons being rendered as black as outlined elsewhere in one of my responses to this question without having to convert the frames to Picture boxes as suggested.
In the WPF app as a menu choice is selected xaml code is dynamically created and displayed via a wrapper with a WindowsFormsHost tag. A dynamically created control object from the .Net winform app is then pushed into the WindowsFormsHost tag on the xaml and the control is made visible on the .net project which fires vb6 UserControl_Show and then load and display of the vb6 form.

I think what you will have to do is extract the VB6 form contents into an ActiveX control. You can then expose this in your ActiveX dll and place that in your WPF form. I doubt it's possible to host a VB6 form within any other type of form.

Can you even load that VB6 form in another VB6 form? I suggest you get that working first.

There is no reliable way to set parent of a VB6 form. You can always hack it or use plain ActiveX control (UserControl in VB6) as UI container instead of VB6 forms.

I found a method to do what was needed within WinForms rather than WPF at this point.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vb-interop/VB6formsinNET.aspx
I figure if I can get it working 100% there I can port it over to WPF or worse case host the WinForm element in the WPF form if I absolutely have too (U-G-L-Y).
Anyway, I've gotten a bit closer, but am having a very odd issue with certain controls painting too the screen. Radio/Option buttons are rendering as solid black:
http://www.evocommand.com/junk_delete_me/optionbuttons.png
I've tried explicitly changing the controls' background color from buttonface to a fixed color and it still does it. I'm assuming it's a layering issue with the option buttons being within the frame control. I'm at a bit of a loss on how to proceed without massive rework of the VB6 content to change the options buttons to checkboxes. It's a hefty app and there are 600+ option button controls across the application that I don't exactly want to deal with.
EDIT:
I was able to confirm it has something to do with the layering of the option within a Frame control. If pulled out to the base form the issue does not occur:
http://www.evocommand.com/junk_delete_me/optionbuttons2.png