Develop Reference

Balloon pop up over control mouse enter/exit

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?

Issue with how to slide user control left/right

I have a view and within the view, there are two user control, each with a button on it. When the page loads, the first user control will load. when i click on the button in the first user control, I would like to slide the first user control left, making it invisible and display the second user control. when i click on the button in the second user control, I would like to slide the second user control right, making it invisible and displaying the first user control again. can anyone help on how to achieve this?

If I get correctly, you want something like Carousel in wpf. In case that's it, here's the link. It allows you to slide several items left-right to switch between them.
Another way to go would be using default animations in WPF, meaning DoubleAnimation applied to Margin property that increases margin from 0 to 500 (to move it off the screen) and back to 0 (to return it) or something like that. Head's up for double animation and moving controls is here and official documentation here.

Rather than hard-code an animation designed for your specific scenario, you could do something a little more generic and adapt the TransitionControl that uses pixel shaders. Set the content property and you can specify which shader effect you want it to apply as the transition.

C# Gray out a control and draw another on it

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.

Is it possible to get your user control to display those alignment guides when placing them on a WinForm?

In Visual Studio (2008) when you place a textbox on a Windows Form, and drag it around, you see very helpful guidelines which help you align it (left, right, top or bottom) to other controls. You also see a line the represents the bottom of the text in that control helping you align the text within your textbox, to the text within a label, regardless of the height of that label.
I have user control that contains a textbox and a couple of buttons. Can I force the VS2008 designer to show me the same line for the bottom of the text, from the textbox within my user control? If so, how?

Seems like this answer might be what you need - Baseline snaplines in custom Winforms controls

WinForms (.NET) Button Anchoring when Maximized

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.