I made custom borders for my application, like the VisualStudio 2012
There is one central mainform and 4 smaller, dynamically positioned border forms.
In the mainform I have overidden the events OnMove, OnSizeChanged, OnActivate, OnDeactivate.
In those events I set the location, size and color of the borders.
It works quite nicely, but there is some awful artifacts!
Those are the same artifacts that appear when resizing ANY window.
I made a video with my application to show what kind of atrifacts I mean.
Those appear when moving or resizing the window.
Obviously this problem IS solveable, because VisualStudio2012 does it too (meaning that it doesn't have the problem. Just try it, resize the VS2012 window, it won't flicker)
In my implementation I used the same way that VS2012 uses: 4 layered windows that make up the border of the form.
In case someone doesn't the glitches I'm talking about. Here's the video:
http://youtu.be/kKiPke8ruaI
What I need is a way to "synchronously" set the location and size of the 4 border windows.
Related
This is only an issue if you have Drop Shadows turned off in appearance settings.
I noticed some of our applications form windows had no borders. Specifically they have been missing the 1 pixel thick border for the left part, right part and bottom part of the form window. All of the forms had in common that they were using FormBorderStyle FixedToolWindow or SizableToolWindow. When it is like this it is hard to distinguish where one dialog stop and another one begins.
We find it plausible that some of our users will have their computers set up like this without the ability to change it.
Is there a way to get the dialog windows looking better without doing anything crazy like manually drawing all borders?
Quoting part of a comment by Hans Passant:
By design for Win10, the left/bottom/right borders are transparent. Still quite visible against the large drop-shadow, so visible that is hard to tell that the border is transparent...
Our application has its own grahpical style that made it especially hard to distinguish where one dialog stops and the other one begins.
The quick solution for us was to stop using FormBorderStyle FixedToolWindow or SizableToolWindow.
Long term we are going trough all our dialogs and the graphical style of our application to make the dialogs more easily distinguishable from each other with or without borders.
I have an application designed in visual C# that is about a quarter of a normal computer screen. The reason its that small is because its easier to work with in Visual Studio. However, I would prefer if when I run it, it maximizes to the full screen. I tried this in my Main_Load:
this.WindowState = FormWindowState.Maximized;
This causes the window itself to maximize, but the application itself is still quarter of the screen. Is there a way to maximize the application itself, and not just the window?
I am guessing you have not docked or anchored any of the controls, meaning they will not move when the window is resized.
Have a look at docking here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.dock(v=vs.110).aspx
And have a look at anchoring controls here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.anchor(v=vs.110).aspx
Both pages should help you understand how to make controls resize with the window.
Either you change the size of your application window in the visual studio designer so it fits your personal screen (bad idea), or you make your application aware of window size and window size changes and actively scale parts of the GUI programmatically (better).
If WinForms, as others have stated, you need to Anchor and/or Dock your controls so they know how to resize in relation to the Form when the Form size changes. These will work for simple layouts.
For more complicated needs, however, check out the TableLayoutPanel and/or the FlowLayoutPanel.
A robust User Interface is probably going to be using all of these elements in one way or another...
I've rewritten a toolbar that sits at the top of the user's screen. It works, but for some reason, though the app consists of just a form with a Fill-Docked ToolStrip, I cannot get it to stay at the size I specify. It's supposed to be the size of the Windows titlebar, as designed in Visual Studio, but as soon as I run it, it's grown in height by five or six pixels. Everything is set rigidly, the Form and ToolStrip are set to AutoSize=FALSE and I've specified the size in pixels the form should be. I cannot work out what is resizing the form at runtime; the ToolStrip is Docked on Fill mode so it should not cause the form to grow. It all looks perfect in the GUI builder, and I copied most of the configuration from the old VB.Net toolbar it will replace. Can anyone help?
Just a wild guess, but have you tried changing the AutoScaleMode property of the Form to something other than Font?
Haven't found an answer but I'll make sure this is closed. I turned the form transparent and it accomplished what I needed. Still unsure why the form expanded when run.
I would like to remove the resizing border from my WPF custom window.
I already found that I have to handle the WM_NCCALCSIZE message and return 0.
That removes the border and aligns the window to the top left corner of the window.
The problem is that by doing so, the client area increases and the WPF root control doesn't.
That creates black edges on the left and bottom sides of the window that I would like to get rid of.
I'm using VS2010 C# Windows XP and would like this to work under both Windows XP and Windows 7.
Thanks in Advance.
EDIT:
I found out what is causing the black edges, they are the window behind.
Now it seems that the problem is with the root element of the window not occupying the whole window. When I set its margin to negative values it draws over the black area. Apparently the layout pass is ok and the desired size is the same as the window but the render size is different.
I also found out that the whole problem could be solved by removing WS_THICKFRAME from the window style. The problem with that is the resizing functionality that is enabled only when WS_THICKFRAME is used. I'm using WM_NCHITTEST to do the resizing and if the window knows it doesn't have a resizing border, it will shutdown its resizing functionality.
I would like to make the root element occupy the whole window to eliminate the black window background or alternatively enable the native resizing functionality without the thick frame.
Thanks.
I found the reason for that black area.
It appears that the code I was using that someone else made was causing the black area by somehow messing with the layout pass of the framework and therefore the correct size of the root element.
I handled the WM_NCCALCSIZE in another project and it worked like a charm.
After all of that, although I found the idle way to create a custom window with all of the original window functionality, I decided to use the standard window the Microsoft has to offer so that my program will have future compatibility with windows.
If someone would like the code or help with WPF window customization they can comment here and I will help so that at least all of my research won't go in vain.
Thanks for reading.
I have an application I have been working on for a while in VS2008 developing in Windows XP and it has some panels placed in specific spots so the borders line up and look nice and pretty. Now that I have switched to developing in 7, as far as I can tell everything else is in the same place but it moves both panels over a little bit and one up and one down and messes up my nice borders. Since it still works correctly in XP I'm assuming this is a 7 problem or a VS problem with 7. Anyone have an idea whats going on or if its fixable?
So I figured it out. Turns out the client area wasn't narrower, however the titlebar which is part of the dialog box border was two different sizes in XP and 7. Since the panels were in an mdi child, where the border was not shown because it was underneath the parent, the size of the titlebar part of the border was making a difference in the location my panels were shown relative to the parent. To solve this I set FormBorderStyle to none on the child and re-positioned the panels to be in the correct spot without that titlebar. It now looks the same in XP and 7 since that variable bar size is gone.
Windows in Windows 7 have wider borders.
Your form probably has a fixed size that is based on a Windows XP border width.
Therefore, in Windows 7, the form's client area will be narrower.
If this is in fact the problem, you can solve it by setting the form's ClientSize property in the constructor the the value it currently has in XP.
If this is not the problem, please post more details.
Do you need to have your panels pixel-positioned? .NET 2.0 introduced the FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel for resizeable positioning of elements.
The TableLayoutPanel is the more useful of the two. You create rows and columns, which can autosize or size proportionally to each other. You dock the TableLayoutPanel in your form or anchor it to all four sides. Then the user can resize your form and everything resizes with it.
Even if your panels are of a specific size, you can anchor them to a side or a corner so that they stick to the side even if the user resizes the form.