I´m using WinForms. I want to make a little class, which modifys controls to show it´s working.
I want to draw an overlay over for example a button. It should be a half-transparent gray.
After that i want to draw a ProgressBar on over it (in the center). Similar to This, except using a progress bar.
How can i realize this? I don´t want to set the position of the progressbar, just drawing it on the other one.
How could i do this?
Thanks :)
I have done something similar before.
You need to use Button.DrawToBitmap(Bitmap, Rectangle) to get the image of the button. Then make the Bitmap grayscale (there are multiple algorithms available for this; I have used the last one successfully although probably not originally from this site).
Now, I did this with an entire form instead of a button, but I disabled the form, and then covered the entire form with an image of itself, altered and then covered it with the progress bar (itself in a panel with other controls).
You could just as easily disable the button, cover it with a panel containing the image and the progress bar on top of it.
Related
I'm looking to add a 'mapview' type control to my project.
It must have a 'main map' image with clickable transparent rectangles with borders and icons/images that can be animated when an event occurs.
What would be the best way of achieving this using windows forms in C#?
My first thought was to use a picture box with other items on top of it but I might run into problems with transparency etc.
Are there any libraries or anything out there that would be able to achieve this?
No need for a library, really:
I would go for a regular doublebuffered Panel subclass or even a PictureBox subclass for the board/map along with a movable Label or Panel subclass fpr the rectangles/items.
Important: Make sure the Labels are not just 'put on top' of the PictureBox but really nested!! (lbl.Parent = pbox). Then transparency will work just fine..
Since PictueBox is not a 'container', to nest a control in it you need code. But since you probably want to create them dynamically this is not an issue anyway.
This assumes that the rectangles are not overlapping! For overlapping controls transparency in winforms will not work.
The clearer you understand the 'animate when event' part the easier the rest of the code will be..
Since you mention 'animation', a word of warning: Simple animation, especially in reponse to a user action is doable; for more classy animation you may run into the limits of winforms.
My main form has a horizontal splitcontainer on it. The top portion contains an Object List View control found here.
I am using code from a previous C# transparent overlay form answer.
My issue seems to have something to do with the Object List View. Using the code from the answer above, the transparent form covers all controls perfectly, however when it gets to the Object List View it seems to draw darker over this specific control.
If I close the transparent overlay and bring a blank panel to the front, when I open the transparent overlay, it still shows this darker section as if the object list view control is still visible.
I would first like to know why this is happening. But I would also like to know how I can fix this so that the overlay is consistant.
In case you wish to test this I created a simple project to demonstrate the issue here
To replicate what happens...
Drag the splitcontainer down a little and click the Overlay button.
Close the overlay by clicking in the White Panel. Click the Blank Panel button then click the Overlay button again.
Please note that in the Plexiglass class, it is taking a panel as a parameter only for the sake of this demonstration, in my actual project, it takes the main form as a parameter.
EDIT
I changed the color from dark gray to white and it works perfectly. I am not sure why the dark gray was causing that issue, but I am pleased with the way it looks with white so I will stick with that.
For some reason, the Color.DarkGray BackColor attribute for the transparent form was causing the issue. Changing the BackColor to Color.White fixed this.
Thanks to Patrice Gahide for helping me.
Hello,
Above is the program I am writing. On the right panel is basically two custom controls (the blue rectangle area) I created and just added them as controls to the background panel control when this winform program loads.
I used MS paint to draw out the pop up balloon that I want to see when my mouse enter this control's area. I want to do the following:
1. If mouse enter the control area, the yellow area balloon pop up and populate with the information of that specific control
2. If mouse move out of the control area, the pop up balloon disappear.
Can this be done with Winform application? I looked around and found out about Tooltip class but so far from researching I don't know if it does what I want to do.
I could be wrong but googling around gave me the impress that Tooltip offers very little in term of style. Ideally I want to make this pop up balloon into almost like a border-less pop up window where I can put image , font ect.....at will. Also Tooltip works if you hover over a button or specific field whereas I want the entire control area.
Can this be done? I appreciate if you can point me to any work around if there is one.
I wrote a comment, but I figure I'll expand it into a full answer. This is assuming you want a new control, which isn't a tooltip, for maximum customizability. I did something similar to this for work recently, to act as a non-modal info popup that disappears when clicked.
Creating a Custom Popup Form
What you want is essentially a floating popup that appears over your form, which means you'll want to define a new Form object, rather than a UserControl, as it won't actually be embedded within your other form.
Give it a multiline, non-editable textbox that you can fill with the information you want to populate, then simply call a new instance of the form on your Mouse_Enter event. Close it upon Mouse_Leave.
Adjusting The Style
You'll have to play with it a bit to get it to actually act like a popup and not just a window. I'd recommend setting it to a non-modal popup, and removing the border. You can write a function to automatically size it to its contents. I don't imagine you'll want the user manually resizing it.
Some other things to look into would be overriding the CreateParams property that comes with the basic Form object. You can force DropShadows and TopMost forms without making the form modal. Overriding ShowWithoutActivation to always return true will prevent the form from stealing focus when it pops up.
I'm not sure if you can pull off rounded edges like you have in your mockup. Perhaps you can pull it off with some wizardry in the OnPaint() function, but I couldn't tell you how to do it.
It might be a bit of a pain for fiddling around with, but you can get some good functionality and appearance out of it. If you think you can pull it off acceptably with the ToolTip class, go for it. It took me about a week to get my notifications where I wanted them (though I added several features that you probably don't need to worry about).
Examples
Some keywords to look up in related searches would be Toast Notification and Non-Modal Popup. This might be some use:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/442983/Android-Style-Toast-Notification-for-NET
Since you already have implemented custom user controls you might want to try it again. Make a control that is that style and color, changes it's size based on it's text. You can feed it information (such as the text to display) from your existing user control object. You can also have the mouse enter/leave code reside in your first user control.
If you're not sure how to make a rectangle with round corners you can either make it on the fly using a graphics object (which will turn into a bitmap on the screen) or make it how you want it to look in GIMP (or photoshop if you have it) then use that image as the background on your user control. Make the default background transparent (so your voids above the round corners are not grey). If you make a pre loaded image you'll need to be aware you will only be able to scale it equally in Y and X directions. unequal scaling will make it look distorted.
Can you use the Mouse_Enter event on the control?
I am using c# winforms to show an Image. The displaying of the image is done using a user control. Now I want to provide the user to draw lines, put other small images, write text etc over the image on an overlay control. How can I provide this functionality? If I use another user control to show the overlay control with transparent back, will that work?? any other solution will be welcome.
You might try approaching this with a canvas (Panel) that handles painting the image as the background and all the annotations/markup afterwards. This will make the foreground appear to be transparent. I expect you'll want to set Control.DoubleBuffer for performance.
You might experiment with setting the style ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint. Also, try overriding Control.OnPaintBackground and do nothing, and override Control.OnPaint and do all your painting inside there.
If performance is still unacceptable, pay close attention to the PaintEventArgs.ClipRect property. This is the only area you need to paint. The trick is figuring out which of your annotations/overlays intersect with this rectangle and painting them in the correct order.
Either this canvas or a higher level control will need to track mouse movement so you know where to draw the lines, paste images, etc.
Ok, I have googled, but maybe I put my search in weirdly. :/
I have a VB.NET WinForms application. I have the anchor properties set for all the controls so that it will resize all the controls to look decent when the form is maximized. (Haven't gotten around to manual resizing yet however).
Anyway, the problem:
I go to set the same properties for a button (testing with a single button for now) on the main GUI form/picture. When I go to run the program via F5, it looks decent. But when I maximize the form, the entire button covers up more than it should.
I've taken screenshots of the form so you can see a visual of what I'm talking about. :/
Before: http://zack.scudstorm.com/before.png
After: http://zack.scudstorm.com/after.png
What other propert(y|ies) do I need to set for the buttons to show up correctly? :/ (The buttons go over the boxes that say, for example, "1-1", "2-3", etc.
Thanks,
-Zack
Seems like you have anchored top-left and bottom-right when what you want is just top-left.
Edit: If it's just an image that does not change when the winform changes, then don't anchor your buttons at all. Just put them where they go. If you are scaling the image, then I would either detect the clicks on the image and do the scaling math or do the scaling math and set my buttons in code in the Form.OnResize event.
As it appears that your goal is just to be able to handle clicks on the "computers"...
One option that can be useful for this sort of task is to create an "overlay" bitmap (not displayed, but which is the exact same size as your source bitmap) which uses different colors to represent all the clickable regions. (e.g. (R=0,G=0,B=0) for computer 0, (0,0,1) for computer 1, etc)
You could even generate this bitmap somewhat automatically without too much trouble (If you have a mode where you can click the top left and then bottom right corners of the image to define a new region)
When the mouse is clicked, you can check the pixel at the scaled coordinates of the mouse position in the overlay and determine what their click corresponds to. This can be a lot easier than creating loads of controls, and makes it a lot easier to have clickable regions that aren't rectangular.