Ive been working on a C# project for a while now and I fell it needs change its look.
I have found a UI kit that I really like, which can be seen below:
http://medialoot.com/item/transparent-ui-kit/
Does anyone know how to do this?
Thanks
EDIT: Im using WinForms
EDIT2: Maybe I should convert over to WPF? Is this doable?
You can subclass most common controls and draw their appearance yourself. However, unless for novelty applications I doubt your users will thank you for doing so.
Your example is a library of controls. For you to have an appearance such as that you'll have to create or acquire a similar library of controls and replace all your controls in your project to get that appearance.
If you want to update colors (background, foreground, etc.) and such you can make a class that recurses through controls and sets the settings using reflection and a switch statement to process each control. Then just run this on each form before you show it. One word of caution about this, some controls don't respect your changes and get overridden with themes from the OS (datetimerpicker being the biggest culprit). You'll also need to consider whether your users will appreciate the extra work put in for color/appearance changes.
If you don't have very good design skill and have a good know how about creating such templates, its better to buy them.
And C# is just a language. You're looking to create templates and skins for either for ASP.NET website/application or for windows forms.
Have a look at DevExpress Skins
If you can afford it.
Related
I would like to know if it's possible to use a data template and a list system without the listview controller on xamarin forms.
You can definitely roll your own controls that use the templating engine. It would just take a whole lot of additional work with custom renderers for each platform etc. If you want to look into that you can check out the source code for Xamarin Forms since it's open source to see how they implemented the ListView. I think the negative voting is because this is quite a broad question that doesn't have an easy answer.
Is someone know any .NET Winform control which look like this button control?
QPushButton:
http://zetcode.com/gui/csharpqyoto/layoutmanagement/
You have several options here. You aren't specific about exactly which part of the platform you are using, but if using Winforms, you can certainly customize the buttons to some extent.
If you are using WPF, you can pretty much make it look exactly like you want in XAML. Check out Expression Blend.
As #Dimitri put it, the sky is the limit, but you may need to do the leg work.
You can create custom controls according your need and have its reference added to your project. you will have it added to your toolbox that you can use.
If you are refering to a button that is located on this example form:
We currently finishing our own application that has rather similar looking buttons. We did this by using a third party component. Steps are:
We purchased DevExpress.com's WinForms library.
We developed our own DevExpress Skin (with the help of an external screen design guy)
This was a bit of a work and some amount of money but the results look pretty neat.
I have an idea for a personal project. And I know one way of accomplishing it in Windows Forms (which I no longer wish to use). Basically I could (in WinForms) just draw everything onto the screen (Form) and then when I need to switch views/states of the application, just redraw the new stuff in the old stuff's place.
But how can we have different states in WPF? Is there a "right" or "proper" way of doing this? Is something like this covered somewhere in the docs?
I'd like to do my own searching, but I have no idea what exactly to look for, and current attempts at finding the right information, so far have yielded no helpful (or even relevant) results.
Any help at all will be greatly appreciated. I am new to WPF, but have been making a lot of progress this past week!
Thank you!
P.S.:
I just thouhght of something. If the solution was to draw what is needed for one screen, and when it is time to display the next screen, just dispose of/hide everything and create/display the new stuff, then how would we get around this? Because we can't/shouldn't change XAML markup at runtime, can/should we? :/
Not sure how you drawn your views/states in WinForms (direct painting on a Graphics object?).
The closest to what you're describing is the VisualStateManager. You can use it to statically define several visual states inside a single XAML and transit between them (using a smooth animation if you want).
If what you've done was show different Forms with Show/ShowDialog(), then the equivalent would be to use different Windows and Show/Hide them.
If you just cleared/added Controls to your form, then you can do just the same in WPF. Most Controls in WPF have a Content or Children property instead of Control.Controls in Forms.
I don't know if I understand what you really want. But here are my thoughts:
You can use several Windows and Show/Hide them accordingly
You can use the Frame/Page functionality in WP (MSDN)
if you really need to you could load your XAML and remove the topmost content in your Window and replace it with the loaded content
You could use the VisualStateGroup functionality to change the appearance of your current window
I think you will be happy with the second solution
I was wondering is there any option of using Stylesheets for .NET Windows controls ?
If not, which is the best way to make the UI look consistent.I need to use VS 2005 to make
the changes in the UI.
Regards
We derive usercontrols from all controls in our system -- all the derived classes do is set the style from a central list of constants defining colours and fonts. Then we use these controls on our WinForms for a consistent look and feel.
If we want to change the style, we just change the list of constants.
This also allows is to perform UI tricks like setting the background colour of controls to a different colour when they are being edited.
If you want to make your UI consistent and pretty, why don't you give WPF a try? You will be able to organize your styles in resource dictionary, then reference to it in all the other projects.
Well guess he's talking about WinForms. Then you cant use Stylesheets. Havnt coded that much of WinForms. But guess you could have an "Settings/sheet" class that have properties of different style you are using and then set them when creating your controls.
you can use Stylesheets in web pages only not in Windows controls.
Even ASP.NET controls, which ultimately render HTML, are notoriously CSS-unfriendly. The reason is that they use tables extensively for layout, and they set a lot of inline style tags which of course do not honor the style sheet. Some work has been done to create wrappers for these controls, but it was incomplete the last I looked.
It's a shame, but our team will not use the out-of-the box controls most of the time. We've rolled our own and packaged them into an internal library. While the Microsoft controls would have been very useful, they simply don't meet our criteria for clean, accessible, styleable HTML.
Microsoft seems, finally, after something like 10 years, to have realized that this is important to a modern development team. The control output of ASP.NET MVC is far cleaner and behaves itself quite well with respect to CSS. Whether they'll eventually revisit the core ASP.NET controls is anyone's guess.
I have a winforms application where users will be creating stock items, and a time of creation there are a number of different things that need to happen.
I think the UI for this should probably be a wizard of some kind, but I'm unsure as to the best way to achieve this. I have seen a couple of 3rd party Wizard controls, and I have also seen manual implementations of making panel visible/invisible.
What are the best ways that people have used in the past, that are easy to implement, and also make it easy to add "pages" to the wizard later on if needed?
I know this answer has already been accepted, but I just found a better Wizard control that's free, and of course, since it's on CodeProject, includes the source, so you can modify it if it's not exactly what you want. I'm adding this as an answer for the next person to stumble across this question looking for a good Wizard control.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/DesignTimeWizard.aspx
Here are a few more resources you should check out:
This DevExpress WinForms control: http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WinForms/Wizard/
A home-grown wizards framework: http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/articles/60155.aspx
A wizard framework by Shawn Wildermut part of the Chris Sells's Genghis framework: http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/genghis/
Use a tab-control inside a form.
Change back color to "Control" in all tab-pages.
Set "appearance" to flat buttons to get rid of the white border-stuff.
Hide the tabs by sizing the entire control so that the tabs gets pushed up "under" the title bar of the form. If you need other controls (or banner maybe) above the tab-control, then instead hide the tabs with a panel-control or similar.
Childplay to code logic for back/next buttons and very easy to extend with new pages.
Take a look at this article on MSDN about "inductive user interfaces". It describes a framework (and provides the code to download) based on UserControls that give you "navigation" within a form. Perfect for designing wizards.
The easiest way to create a wizard dialog is to use one of the third-party versions available that handle all of the "hard stuff" (the page navigation, UI framework, etc.) for you. The one I like the most is from Divelements; they have both a WinForms and a WPF version.