One small question. I know the toolbox in Visual Studio has all the necessary components, but I was wondering if we could introduce our own "custom-made" tools. For example, the listbox tool. I've created a "SpeechListBox" class in which I've mentioned all the methods that I want my listbox to use, but when I'm in the "SpeechListBoxApplication" class (where I wanna use this listbox), the listbox with my methods doesn't show up, instead the general listbox tool that doesn't have my methods shows up.
What I want is to write something like private speechListBox1 SpeechListBox; and somehow introduce a visual form to the design class without confusing it with the toolbox's listbox. Making the program realize that I want this type of list box with all the extended methods, not the general toolbox type.
Is there any way to either make our own listbox or add methods to the original listbox tool?
Well, if you derive your SpeechListBox from a class that either is or derives from System.Windows.Forms.Control, when you compile your project it will show up in the Visual Studio control toolbox.
If you aren't sure which class to derive from, you'll have to make some decisions. If you want to hand-draw everything yourself, derive straight from Control itself. If you want to build a control is is a composite of other controls, consider deriving from UserControl. You don't explicitly list exactly what you're trying to do with your SpeechListBox, but you may want to consider just using a ListBox but supplying it with custom drawn list items. You could do this by making your class derive from ListBox or just configuring a ListBox to do what you want right in the form on which the listbox resides.
Is your code in separate project? Then you have to add that project to your SpeechListBoxApplication project's references in the solution explorer.
Otherwise your inherited control (public class SpeechListBox : ListBox) should show up, when in the GUI Designer in the toolbox in either the Common section or a section labeled after the project.
Related
I want to develop a custom form designer for a scripting language. The controls' properties and behavior are very very similar to the windows forms controls.
I know that design such application is not an easy task and develop it from scratch is a little to advanced for me. So I googled for it and found lots of examples in c# for custom forms designers.
I picked this one to work on top of it:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163634.aspx
Most of the windows controls properties won't be used, and some will be new. Let's take a button as example, I won't need many propertie like AllowDrop, Tag, etc. Some will be new, like ControllerType and BehaviorType. Others are preety much the same but with other name, like Location which will turn to be Position.
The best approach I could think of is to create a new class derived from Button and create these new properties on this class.
I managed to implement all this but now I have a problem with the PropertyGrid. Since I'm not using most base class properties, I would like to hide them on the PropertyGrid, and if possible, rename the properties that have a diferent name. I cannot control the attributes of the base class to set [Browsable(false)].
So my questions are:
1) Is this approach I'm following correct, or is there a better one?
2) Can I control the PropertyGrid behavior like what I need or do I need to develop a custom propertygrid?
3) If I can't run away from creating a custom PropertyGrid, could someone hint me on how to do this?
I just finished adding and removing different database models (I was trying to figure out which one I should be using for this project) then after playing around for a while I noticed one of my classes's icon changed from what is shows beside my Calculations.cs class in the first image to the Balance.cs icon.
The Balance.cs now has this Designer component so when I double click on it I see my second screen shot. This seems to be allowing me to add components from the toolbox to my class. There are actually two classes within my Balance.cs. This Designer thing is only affecting/interacting with one of them (it inherits from SerialPort).
I don't really know what changed or what I did to make this happen and ctrl+z is not being my friend here. How do I change Balance.cs back to a regular class with no designer component?
Thanks
If any of the classes in a source file inherit - either directly or indirectly - from System.ComponentModel.Component (such as SerialPort), Visual Studio will provide design-time support to you. This is sometimes unwanted behaviour, and you can safely ignore it in most cases.
If it really bothers you, you can decorate your class with the [DesignerCategory] attribute (set the category to an empty string).
Soo... I am making a control like the Windows Update "panels".
Everything's fine up to the "container" part.
What I want to do is to allow the designer to place controls in a Panel which is inside my control.
(The panel's variable is held in my control's class and inside the control itself.)
How do I bypass this?
As a reference, you might want to try out this AeroWizard Control, which does this pretty well.
(Yes, I have looked at it and didn't find a clue but custom designers!)
As a side note, I'd rather not make a complicated designer class...
If you don't want to create a custom designer class, you should implement your control as a templated custom control, preferably inheriting from CompositeControl.
There doesn't seem to be a way to do the same in Windows Forms without a custom designer class. However, there's a nice, short, working example of such a designer here.
I've only just started using C#/VS this past week and wondered how to do something which, I think, should be quite simple:
What I want to do is extend the class used by a UI component and therefore implement my own methods in it - just for one instance of a UI component though. If I was using xcode/objective c I would normally just change the class name of the component in interface builder and it would become an instance of that class which would in turn extend the original UI class.
How do I do something comparable using C#/Visual Studio?
You can take any component class in Windows Forms and subclass it. Visual controls all derive from the Control class and you can do so as well.
If your component is a User Control (i.e., it derives from System.Windows.Forms.UserControl), it should automatically appear in the Toolbox after you build the project. For other components, you can add them to the Toolbox by right-clicking on the Toolbox and select Customize Toolbox, selecting the .NET Framework Components tab, clicking the Browse button, and selecting the DLL with the control.
Remember that all (or most) UI components are classes, so they can be "extended" just like any other class.
Some will have virtual members you can override to take special actions. In all cases, you can add properties, methods, and events to the components.
Once you've created and built them, you can use them from the Toolbox, just as though they were the "built-in" .NET components.
I have an application that will run in two modes, each with very similar displays. The application is supposed to allow easy modification of a user interface. One of the features is that it has to display the user interface. Both of these windows look the same, just one has more menus than the other.
I'd like to just create a base template (the user visual) and then inherit it for the editor. That way if one interface changes, both of them change. But this doesn't seem to be possible using WPF. I try to inherit and I get warnings about hiding members. I also don't see how I'm going to append new menus to the base template.
Is what I'm trying to do possible? Is there a better way that I'm supposed to be doing this? It seems like I'm fighting the way that they want me to make the application.
If I got your question properly, all you have to do is create a style for a window in shared resources. When user changes a style it will be automatically applied to every control that uses this style.
For the custom parts you could use ContentPresenters and custom controls..