my client is asking for windows 7 like look for my desktop application (developed in c#.net). please tell me how can i set such theame for my application so that i would look like windows 7... please tell me if any such a controls/theme available... (open source is prefered)... please help me out.. i am using .net framework 3.5... and i am not familer with WPF
My suggestion would be the DevExpress Winforms/WPF components, they look awesome, have great support and are quite easy to use.
First of all: use WPF, they look a lot better.
Second of all: The WPF Toolkit contains lots of useful stuff to create nice UIs.
Lastly: in .NET 4.0 you can create jumplists, icon overlays and stuff like that. If you're using 3.5 then there is the Windows API codepack which you can use for these features.
Related
Any suggestions? Any 3rd party tools? if 3rd party tool, prefering open source/free one?
Can you give specific examples of which controls present what kind of problems? In general, Windows 7 should skin most WinForms controls. If you are interested in using Windows 7 features in a WinForms app, try the Windows API Code Pack. But more details would help ...
Check out Telerik Winforms Controls. Some sample here.
Infragistics .Net Advantage for WinForms contains many WinForms controls with Office 2010-like appearance and behaviors.
I would like to create a basic webdesktop in silverlight 4.
How can I do a windows manager ?
I want to move, resize, minimized, maximized each windows like http://mesh.com...
Does it exist something to create easily a windows manager ?
Do I have to create everything from scratch ?
How ?
Creating a desktop-like environment inside of Silverlight is definitely possible (there are examples out there) but it is not something that is included in the framework. You will need to build each of these features yourself or use a third party library.
You might want to look at projects such as the C64 emulator
Are you looking to do something similar to this Vectorlight sample?
Also, take a look at this blog post about simulating a windows desktop in Silverlight.
I want to know how can I build UIs like skype using standard .Net/C#. Is it possible at all?
Thanks
You can use Windows Presentation Foundation to build more stylish GUIs than Windows Forms. It's pretty difficult to move from Forms to WPF. You usually need a good design tool, like Expression Blend.
AFAIK skype was built using Qt4, it's rather easy to build custom gui widgets, check
C++ GUI Programming with Qt4, 2nd Edition and this tutorial.
P.S. check this to see how to build qt4 on windows using MSVC 2008.
It might be possible to build such an UI using Windows Forms, but only with a lot of custom control code or a really good component suite. But as Chris said, WPF should be the tool of your choice when you want to use .NET.
Qt4 is a really powerful C++ framework, also powering apps like Google Earth. The Qt SDK, inclduing everything you need to get started (Compiler, IDE, documentation), can be obtained here. It's licensed (among others) under the LGPL.
Windows Presentation Foundation will give you the most flexibility, but it can be hard to use. An alternative to this is Sliverlight - Version 3 is going to be capable of being used outside of the browser (similar to Adobe Air), and in some ways provides an easier development experience. You might want to consider using some third party controls to give you access to nice functionality that you wouldn't get out of box.
To my acknowledge Skype is build with Delphi an a set of third party tools, so it for sure can be done without WPF.
Take a look at the components from DevExpress or TMS.
The new Windows 7 taskbar features, like jump lists, previews, etc. are really cool, and I want to allow my C# applications to use them. I have two questions:
First of all, how can I use these functions (in general)? I found two articles by Microsoft about this, but I'm not really sure what to do. Could you provide links to a library, as well as some sample code?
Next, let's say that I figure out how to use these Taskbar functions. My question is, is there some built-in way of checking whether the OS is Windows 7, and thus enabling the taskbar functions? If I didn't have this logic in my app, would it have problems if it was run on a non-Win7 machine?
Thanks!
In the first article you link to there is a sample library that you can download that makes use of the new Windows 7 features.
This article shows how to check the version of Windows your application is running on.
As always, if you call an API that isn't in existence, then yes, your app will experience some turbulence. Remember, it's (almost) always better to check for a condition and act accordingly once (as in application startup) than to try something over and over in code and catch exceptions.
Windows API Code Pack for .NET Framework is your one stop shop for a ton of .NET API for Windows programming, including Taskbar. This library gives you a complete API set to work with Windows 7 Taskbar and then some. It also includes samples for WPF, and Winform.
Another good source for Windows 7 content is the Windows Team Blog
I am wondering whether WPF on .Net 3.5 supports touch or multi-touch for laptop? Appreciate if there are some cool Demos to show the effect.
I am using VSTS2008 + C#.
thanks in advance,
George
WPF 4.0 Beta 2 supports full multi-touch, but only on Windows 7, as Windows 7 is the first multi-touch enabled Windows version.
For 3.5 on XP you can try out the Breeze for WPF 3.5 multi-touch framework at http://code.google.com/p/breezemultitouch/ its open source and plugs into TUIO (multi-touch protocol). TUIO allows you to bridge between various multi-touch devices and your WPF 3.5 application without the need for operating system multi-touch support.
It's not really WPF's responsibility to support touch-devices, but the O/S. The O/S simply delegates the events of mouseDown == fingerTouchedScreen to WPF (not a 100% accurate statement, but good enough :) ).
If you want to develop WPF for touchscreen-devices, you really need to look at your UI design instead of what's supported and what's not.
This post has a nice answer for that.
Basically, you work with the same events as you'd do with your standard smith'n'wesson point'n'click devices :)
Not natively, but check out the Windows 7 Code Pack, which brings 7-based features to .NET developers. This is code from MS, btw, not a 3rd party library.
It includes multitouch code, but I don't know exactly how easy it is to use in a WPF application.
Relevant links:
http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2009/08/07/windows-7-code-pack-v-1-0-released.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7
There's some great sample code in the "Windows 7 Training Kit For Developers". Sure you'll need Windows 7, but it's totally worth it!
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7