Develop Reference

Sketch effect on an image in windows phone 7

I am working on an image editor app having functions like cropping, text rendering, framing etc. I want to implement sketch effect now ie, the photo shall be converted to sketch. I am using Nokia.Graphics.Imaging.Managed library for doing it. It works very fine but only in wp8.
the dll is not compatible for wp7. Please suggest me any free library or any image manipulation method to achieve the functionality.
Thanks in advance

Aviary I've used in the past. Read their terms and conditions if you decide to go with their SDK.

How do you set a custom theme for a .NET application?

Much as the title says, I am wondering how to style a program like Photoshop CS4 or Autodesk Maya 2011. These programs are styled to where the UI looks completely custom. Right now I am using C# to program, but I can easily switch to C++ and WinAPI if it is easier. I have done multiple google searches for styling controls in C#, but there are seemingly no accurate results.
Much thanks for any help,
-Thomas

If you using C#, WPF is a way to go, to make some custom UI. WinForms are not so modifiable.

This is a no easy task. DevXpress offer a wide range of skins with their components, so does Telerik.
There is a free library (without source) at Skybound, however this one is pretty old and not being developed anymore.

Render page as a picture

I have question to Java or C# programmers. I want to render some pages in various browsers mainly Firefox and IE and save it as a picture. I have not any serious experience in Java/.Net. Is there any libs/tools for such tasks? I thought about some FF extensions for example but I don't know how to do it in IE. Is the in .Net some libs for dealing with it? Maybe some ActiveX? Any sugestions?

http://www.vesic.org/english/blog/winforms/render-html-to-quality-jpeg/

I'm not sure what your end goal is, but perhaps http://browsershots.org/ offers the functionality you're looking for? It would appear they offer both an XML-RPC interface and also the source code freely.
Edit: It looks like the source code link isn't properly hooked up currently.

You can use the FireFox Screengrab extension - it's very handy!
"Screengrab! is an extension that
makes it easy to save a web-page as an
image – it’s a screen capture tool for
Firefox!
With it, you can save anything that
you can see in a browser window – from
a small selection, to a complete
page."

How do I give professional look and feel to my .NET windows application?

I'm using WINFORMS not WPF.
I just know basic c# .net gui programming. I donot want the traditional windows look. I want to have my own custom look (eg. gtalk, antivirus softwares, media players, google chrome).
Actually I'm inspired by google's PICASA software. Its awesome. I want to do something like that.How can I do that? If there is something I should learn please point me.
Also I may have to write my own custom controls (like modified tree view etc..) I guess. Please give some good learning resources.

This article describes how to draw custom windows. The author also shows how to draw non-rectangular windows.
If you could use WPF instead of Windows Forms, this is a good article about customizing window drawing:
http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_wpf/article.php/c16379/
There is also a question with some good answers here on SO:
Creating custom forms in WPF?
Update:
I think that skinning and custom drawing is fun to do from a programmers perspective, but I also think that there is almost no benefit for the user.
The creators of the platform you are developing for might have put a lot of effort into the design of their windowing toolkits.
If you just want to change some visual aspects of your application you also should take into account that you might miss some important other aspects of UI design:
consistency
accessibility
aesthetics (if you are overdoing
effects, gradients, ...)
internationalization
...
As you are developing for Windows, you also lose the skinning ability of the OS itself. And I think that some of the skins that come with newer versions of Windows are pretty good.

You can try any of the following:
telerik
Syncfusion
(source: componentsource.co.jp)
Or other components.
They do make your UI pretty.
Edit: if you want to study how they do it, you can buy the source code-- along with documentation and understand from there.

There are some commercial control libraries available.
I can recommend the Krypton Suite. It consists of the free Krypton Toolkit (which contains a lot of skinnable controls) and other non-free controls (Navigator, Ribbon, Docking, Workspace). It has some built-in palettes and renderers that allow you to make your UI look like Office 2010, Office 2007, Office 2003, ...

You want to look for +winforms +skinning. I haven't tried these, but the first hits don't look bad. Most decent skinning tools will be paid for.

From what you said, you want to develop your own custom controls. You have some frameworks for this like Qt which can use Direct3D for hardware accelerated graphics. It also have a Visual Studio plugin. There is a free LGPL version and a commercial version of it.
I remembered about Qt because you mentioned Picasa and as far as I remember, I heard the Picasa UI has been written through Qt.

You can try using "SetWindowRgn(..)" to set an arbitrary region for your window. This may range from giving a rounded rectangle shape to giving a weird looking shape to the form!
Check this out: Link.
There is another option if you are working in Vista(aero enabled), ie you can check out DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea(..) function here: link text
You can set the form's border style to 'none' and go on to create your custom form! You then might have to create custom buttons to carry out tasks like close, minimise, maximise etc. You might even need to write code for drag and drop events..
For the background, you might need to have a look at the gradient fills to give a great effect, otherwise you can use great looking pictures as Background..! But the latter option isnt good unless you have really good pic.

How to program this game with basic C# and ASP .NET knowledge?

I would love to brainstorm with you guys on how to program this game (originally a flash game) in C#. I'm studying C# right now and my knowledge is pretty limited: I know the pretty much the basics of C# but I need your help with the concept.
Here's the game:
http://www.composica.com/product/samples/AstroHops/content/scaler.html
alt text http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/5735/frogim3.jpg
I thought about using imagebutton for each lilypad that would trigger a modal window with question.
I also thought about placing a picture of a frog on each lilypad, set to visible = false. When the a certain lilypad is selected the frog's visibility will be set to true.
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestion on how to this better?
Maybe links to a similar game coded with c#?
Thanks!

ASP.NET (and HTML generally) isn't directly suited to compete with flash - they simply work differently. Perhaps look at Silverlight; that is the MS offering that is closest to flash, and you can use C#.

Marc solution seems like best one, but if you really need it in C# (in ASP.NET Right?)
then you might consider AJAX but yea it is sort of bad approach.
If it is winforms you are talking about, then i would consider using some 2d graphics engine for that. otherwise your idea CAN work with the default .net forms, it just wont look very nice....
you might take a look at this, seems like a nice start point for working with directX and c#
http://www.csharp-home.com/index/tiki-print_article.php?articleId=146
Good luck with your project!