How can I animate the window elements in my application when showing them and closing them or switching between windows?
Using Control templates set Triggers on properties you wish to provide animations for to fire off a storyboard. You might check out this article or one like it. Or you can fire off a storyboard when a window becomes Active which there's also articles out there for like this one but a quick search for something like "WPF Animation" should provide a lot of places to start depending on your circumstances.
I think it's possible to animate a Window. However it's possible you do not enjoy the acceleration and ease that comes with other elements as, as far as I know, those elements are inside WPF while Windows are part of the OS. It's possible you end messing with OS's APIs.
Related
For a while now I have attempted to get into UI design with WPF. My main goal is to create a good-looking application in a borderless window, like for example:
I made this example using the MetroUI framework. While this framework does the trick on borderless window functionality, it also does way too much for my tastes, custom controls, skins, animations, etc. I just want a borderless window and decide everything else myself.
I've searched stackoverflow a lot, and tried a fair amount of frameworks, but nothing seems to suit my needs.
Basically, I would like to have a borderless window with FULL windows functionality (drag to sides to pin, only show shadow if operating system settings has it on, etc etc).
Putting WindowStyle to None but keeping AllowsTransparency at False in order to preserve the original window chrome makes most if not all of the functionality I am seeking for work. However, the obvious problem here is: the window chrome is still there.
This looks like this:
To finally ask my question:
Can we keep all the current functionality that this window chrome provides, but somehow make it invisible (yet keep the dropshadow it provides) ? I can live without the dropshadow but it would be a nice bonus.
Or to ask a more broad question: is there any framework / pre-made project, that simply ONLY handles making a borderless window work properly and no other additional controls, skinning, ... ?
The more time I put into this the more it seems making borderless windows with WPF is simply incredibly clunky and I am getting rather unmotivated on my entire project because of this.
Thank you
See my answer on the following thread, it pretty much sums up all the window issues at once. Hope it helps!
WPF Borderless Window issues: Aero Snap & Maximizing
I'm trying to implement something with the MahApps.Metro style. In the demo there are always those transitions if I click on another tab, but I think this is a little but too much. I found transitions in the documentation, but how do I manage the transitions of those tabs? Is that possible in some way?
I have been looking through the code of the demo, but I couldn't figure out how to control the transitions of the tabs itself. So everytime the content changes there is this transiton. Either I put in a custom transition or turn it off. How do I achieve this?
In MahApps.Metro, there are a few different types of TabControls. The one you're looking for is the one called MetroTabControl, not MetroAnimatedTabControl.
MetroTabControl is your regular TabControl with the Metro style, minus the transitions.
I wonder if there's any way i could reach and change the check boxes in the performance options (visual effects) from C#.
Now I reached only the advanced tab by:
control.exe sysdm.cpl,0,3
but I didn't know a way to continue any further ..
Also, in general, is there a way that we could change somethings in the control panel
via code ?
like increasing the mouse pointer speed, or adjusting screen resolution .. etc
(navigating via code)
it would be really cool .. :)
You can directly set the values: msdn. A similar theme has already been discussed here.
You can also click controls on the windows with UI Automation.
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
Simple question. How can I change the icons of the close, minimize, maximize buttons. Can I do this in Winforms and WPF?
These Icons, the caption, and the border on your window are all drawn while processing the WM_NCPAINT message. So, the way you take over drawing this is by handling this message.
But you don't have access to the state information about the icons (i.e. which button you should draw in it's pressed state because the user is currently clicking on it.). You dont even know where exactly the mouse handling code thinks these icons are.
So to take over non-client paint, you also need to take over non-client mouse handling, and the whole problem just snowballs until you've written thousands of lines of code and your window still doesn't behave quite right when the user tries to drag it, etc.
And that's in unmanaged code, in managed code (C#/.Net) this is even harder because you also have to do interop to get to some of the APIs you need to use.
So the answer is: Yes its possible, but its harder in WinForms and WPF than it is in C++, and those that have attempted it are all bald now.
The real answer is that you shouldn't do this. Users expect all applications to work and look the same. Making them try an figure out what spiffy new icon you use means minimize is likely to make them unhappy.
Doing this isn't difficult but it is a lot of work - you have to basically replace the window frame and handle everything yourself, there is a lot of functionality in the default window frame you have to rewrite - you also have to write different code for Vista/7 with Aero enabled.
In WPF you use the various techniques in http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2008/09/08/custom-window-chrome-in-wpf.aspx
In WinForms you use the same basic techniques but I don't know of a page that summarizes all the details like the link above.
In wpf, you can set WindowStyle="None" for your Window and then set a custom TitleBar for that, with minimize, maximize and close button. I have done this earlier. You need to do some event handling to perform minimize, maximize, close, drag etc.
Yes, you have to create your own window style. Refer to FluidKit, GlassWindows for example.
If you want to control the look of those buttons, you'll have to create your own. This is one value of using Windows features to write windows applications (they come with a standard look and feel).