I've got an idea which is trying to imitate VS.
In my project, I've created many views (user controls).
I want to display these views in a toolbar (like VS) and when I choose one of them, draw the selected view in another control (like a designer, I guess this can be a grid or richtextbox).
Is possible doing this? How much difficult would be? Does exists a demo in internet?
I question this because I'm not an expert in graphics with WPF.
Any questions, please let me know.
Yes it's pretty much possible and won't be too difficult to achieve, but that will depend on complexity of your controls; Look at this article series having similar implementation using Canvas -
WPF Diagram Designer - Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, Part 1
One more project based on this article can be found at codeplex-
http://simulo.codeplex.com/
Also have look at this similar question for some other options -
Creating a UI Designer
Related
We have an old application built on .Net 1.1 Framework and Winforms. We are planning to migrate it to the latest version of .Net.
Here are some of the questions running in my mind:
Should we go with Winforms or WPF?
We want the design and structure to the exact same as what we have now.
What kind of pitfalls can I expect when migrating?
Is there any place where I can lookup to see the process of migration?
Any other suggestions?
Should we go with Winforms or WPF?
This is a very broad question. But my answer to that would be this. Winforms designer is a painful experience and it is not as flexible as WPF by any means so if that is important to you then you should.
We want the design and structure to the exact same as what we have now.
Anything you do in Winforms you can replicate in WPF so no worries there.
What kind of pitfalls can I expect when migrating?
There are too many to name one of the most common ones for our migration was converting existing logic in the WinForms (yes it was a crappy, outsourced, legacy WinForms full of business logic) and connecting it to WPF elements. The process in and of itself is not that complicated but when you have too many intertwined pieces it can get pretty ugly.
Is there any place where I can lookup to see the process of migration?
The process of migration pretty much has to be iterative. So the way many people do it based on my research (articles, StackOverflow answers and such) is through ElementHosts.
1) Target a certain part of your WinForms that you would like to switch up to WPF and then take it out.
2) Replace it with ElementHost.
3) Then in that ElementHost you will have your newly rewritten WPF counterpart.
4) Test it out make sure that it works okay with the rest of the elements.
5) Go to step 1 until rest of the stuff on that window is replaced (You can do header, middle, footer or top, bottom any way you wish to go about replacing elements on the window it depends on your particular situation).
6) Once most of the stuff is replaced you can then combine all of those WPF User Controls into a WPF Window.
As part of a school project, a group and I will develop a Windows application using C#.
We are not very experienced in C# but has some basic understanding for it. We do however have experience from other languages and platforms.
We would like to build an application in which the layout is split into two primary parts: the menu, which will reside to the left and the content which will be to the right.
The menu will be more or less static and when an entry in the menu is chosen, the content will be changed.
We have not been able to figure out the best way for achieving this nor have we been able to find good material on this. The idea is to have one window and add a view (as far as I can understand, this should be a UserControl?) to this window. This control will be the menu.
Now, our question is if anyone can point us in the right direction to achieve the navigation in the program. Say, when a menu entry is clicked, how will we change the content of the window and how will we manage which view is active? I suppose that every view (in the "content area") will have a controller.
We are interested in the "best practices" for this when using WinForms and the MVC pattern.
We hope that someone can help us further in this project.
If I were you I would seriously consider using WPF instead of winforms.
It, and the use of the MVVM pattern, allows you to do some pretty impressive stuff with far less code than if you are using winforms. If you don't already know winforms then it might also be a slightly less steep learning curve as WPF is a better thought out framework (at least in my opinion).
If you go the WPF route spend some time getting to understand how bindings work and how to bind your ViewModel to the UI. Once you have a good understanding of proper UI separation you are able to do far more than you could with the old WinForms framework.
I found this link quite useful when I first started looking at WPF. Especially the RelayCommand.
If you are using Winforms the options that you have got is:
-dynamically clearing forms and generating content on menu navigation
-using mdi container form, which can be parent to a number of child forms
If you are using for WPF you could use Pages in a Frame control loaded based on used menu selection. You could also use MVVM pattern to build your app.
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.
I'm not sure if this is a bad way of building an application but let's say I have 30 WPF Windows for different screens in my application. I want to build them into a DLL so I was wondering if it is bad design to instead of creating each window as a window, if i can have 1 window that hosts whichever screen is open. So the windows will actually be a usercontrol, or at least act like one.
So when you want to go to a different screen, you would just change the content of the 1 window to the content of the "usercontrol" that you want displayed. Does this make sense, or can you see issues with possibly doing this? Thanks.
That may be a good approach but you need to think about whether every screen belongs in the same window. For example is every user control going to use all of the space in the window, or will you have some visual issues? The content of your windows, your data, and how the windows manipulate that data may also have an impact.
You may want to look into design patterns such as MVC and MVVM (more popular with WPF).
This sounds like a much nicer solution than 30 separate windows :) Nothing wrong with it.
You might want to do some reading about presentation patterns to get a good understanding of how to manage applications with multiple screens. Take a look at this excellent (but incomplete) wiki on Presentation Patterns, based on a book in the making by Jeremy Miller with contributions from the great Martin Fowler.
Read through a summary of each of the patterns to get an idea if it applies to your situation, and if it does try Googling around. Many of the patterns in that wiki have evolved fairly recently and the best resources for them so far are disparate blog entries and obscure mailing lists. But it's worth doing the digging because there are some truly inspired gems of information to be found in this arena. Presentation patterns are a very interesting thing!
From what you told I'm thinking that maybe Pages are better for your use than controls. In that case you can user Frame control in main window to support navigation between pages (or hide navigation buttons and navigate from code directly).
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.