Develop Reference

What is the purpose of Popup in XAML Metro apps?

I needed a modal dialog for my app but it appeared there is nothing like that in XAML Metro app. Someone suggested a popup.
I tried and it appeared that underlying UI still responsive.. so a Popup is not modal.
I thought OK may be its purpose is to be a popup in the center of the screen regardless the other layout and it appeared - not. Popup is bound to a layout as everything else. if it is in a grid it will be placed in row 0 and column 0 not in the center..
So may be I missing something. please help to understand. I cant find any use for it different from what can be achieved by using Grid.
what is the purpose of Popup? how it different from any other content controls?

Differences:
You don't have to put it as a child of another control. Though in such scenarios you might get problems traversing the visual tree and focusing on a TextBox won't shift its contents so the virtual keyboard might cover its contents or its adorner contents might lose alignment to adorned controls not on the Popup.
Its content tree is rendered on top of any other content and (I believe) doesn't get clipped by parent control's Clip regions.
You usually need to set its Width and Height manually when first showing or when parent layout (or size) changes, especially in one of the most common scenarios when you set its Width and Height to the Width and Height of the parent (or the window).
That said - modal dialogs are bad UI and should be avoided. You can simply navigate to another page if you would otherwise want to display a dialog or use other approaches. There's (almost) nothing more annoying than displaying a modal dialog over UI that looks otherwise enabled but doesn't respond to input.

I needed a modal dialog for my app but it appeared there is nothing like that in XAML Metro app. Someone suggested a popup.
Since Windows 8.1, there is actually something similar to a modal dialog that you may want to look into:
It's called Flyouts.

Apparently a modal popup with custom content is missing in Windows 8.1. One possible workaround:
use a Popup control (per se not modal)
make the background semi-transparent
stretch it across the entire screen
place the actual popup content inside that container and leave some space around it
Now, the parent page is visible but dimmed, and it cannot be accessed as the Popup is covering it.

Changing textbox text causes parent windows to resize incorrecly

I've tried looking many places for an answer to an issue I'm having and so far I've found nothing.
What I currently have is a c# windows form with user controls inside it. Some user controls have other controls inside them. What happens when I change the text in a textbox, is its parent windows will no longer resize like they should when changing the window size. i.e. A horizontal scrollbar will appear even though horizontal scrollbars are disabled in that specific window. Its almost as if changing the text changes the parent window's styling.
In case this is too vague, I have a textbox inside a panel with a docking property set to fill. The panel has a padding of 10 in order to allow the textbox to have some white space for aesthetic purposes. This control resides within a parent control (we'll call it parent 1), which in turn resides within another control as well (we'll call it parent 2). So when I change the textbox's text (at all, even adding a space), will then make parent 2 have a horizontal scrollbar flicker and sometimes even remain when resizing the form window manually.

You should make sure that not only the TextBox in the UserControl is docked to fill but also that the user control itself and its parent (and its parent) are Docked correctly or have anchor set so that they resize with the Form.
Do you execute any special code when the user enters a character? (KeyPressed event etc.). If yes you should try disabling the events temporarily to see if they cause the problem.
If you post a sample of your code it would be easier to help. Without this we can only guess, like I tried...

I found out my issue! When using autoScrollBars and double buffering, it caused the horizontal scrollbar to show when it shouldn't have (at least in my case) when resizing the window. The answer was simple, forget the autoScrollBars, and implement my own vertical scroll bar!
I was actually getting some code to post up on here for you guys to look at, but when looking at it, I decided to forget the autoscroll, and lo and behold it worked!
I'm actually curious as to why that is though. My friend heard that .net has some issues with autoScroll but I didn't think it would be to this degree.

Tabpage Resizing

A disclaimer first! This might be a very fundamental question, but I have started learning Winforms Application Development on my own (.net 3.5,C#), and I have this resizing question.
I am developing a small Winforms application that has a standard tab control (along with many other controls) placed in the form. (It has 5 TabPages)
The AutoScroll property for the TabPage has been set to “True”. On reading up what I got to understand is that this will enable the scrollbars to show up at run time while resizing. i.e if the height of the form is reduced it will cause the vertical scrollbar to show up within the TabPage.
While the application is running, what I noticed is that if I reduce the height of the form using the little double headed arrow, the scroll bar does not stay on top, i.e if I adjust the height from below, the bottom end of the scrollbar is no longer there. More precisely I am just looking for a way to keep both ends of the scrollbar on top within a TabPage when the form containing the Tab control is resized.

It sounds like the problem is that the tabbed control will show scrollbars and may well autosize, but you haven't told the form what to do.
You might want to look at the 'Dock' property of controls, which causes a control to fill a specific area of the form (or other parent control), no matter what it is resized to.

C# Windows Forms, Controls on tabs

I have a tabcontrol on my form, on each tab I have a control, each of these controls are similar i.e. they each have a table and a couple buttons and each control is set to Dock Fill
When I view them contols in design view something weird is happening, the first tab that is viewable has it controls placed as you would expect and all is fine, but the second and third tab each the controls appear off centre, overlapping the edges of the tab.
I have experimented with placing different controls on different tabs and it appears that if a control is on the first tab it appears fine, if it is on any other it sometimes appears weird.
The really big problem is that this seems to be appearing at run-time as well, but only sometimes.
I've checked the properties of the controls and the tabs but all seems to be the same.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Kind regards
MeeM

Seems like a bug to me, make sure you have all the latest updates for Visual Studio.

Is this a UserControl that you are placing on a tab? If so, I would check all the layout properties on the user control and the child controls inside the user control. I have had this problem before, but I can't remember off had what I did to fix it.

Try this:
First thing is to verify the z-order of your controls is correct. For that open your Document Outline window (View->Other Windows->Document Outline) and visually check for the order of each control one by one. When setting the docking properties of controls the z-order of the controls is applied in reverse; that is: the first child control shown in the document outline has docking precedence over those at the same level lower in the document outline window.
Verify that no 2 child controls of the same parent (in your case the tabControl) have the DockStyle.Fill. As a good practice with docking, only one of the child controls should have its docking set to Fill. If you have this case it is most likely rethinking your layout flow will allow you to change it and have only one with Fill. The other docking styles (right, left, top, bottom) can be used in more than one child control and they'll never cause any problems. Only Fill is the problematic one.
If 1 nor 2 solved your problem, my advice if to avoid docking altogether and use Anchoring instead. You can essentially get very similar results using the Anchor property of the controls. I actually like this approach more, since is kinda similar to WPF anchoring.
If 1, 2 not 3 solve your problem. Post an image with your document outline and I'll recreate it here, fix it and post the solution here.
Hope it helped!

I assume that these are user controls we are talking about. Have you changed the layout of the control (class) itself since you added the user controls into your tabs? If so, they will not automatically update with the new value (for Dock, width, height, etc.).

Best Layout of a WinForms UserControl with both Static and Dynamic Content?

I have a user control that has:
a) a buttons panel at the top (it always has to be visible)
b) a panel with controls that are dynamically added and re-sized at run-time. The controls can be many, so the panel has to be scrollable.
This user control will be hosted in a form, with the following requirements:
a) The initial size of the form will try to fit in maximum part of the dynamic content.
b) On changing the form size, the control has to be re-sized accordingly.
I had played with various anchoring, docking, and auto-sizing and I don't quite get it working in the way I want to. Sometimes, it is the scrolling that messes up, sometimes it is something else.
What combination of anchoring, docking, and auto-sizing of the panels, usercontrol, form should work best to achieve the desired outcome?

I succeeded to meet the requirements. Here is my solution:
The dynamic panel is anchored to the top and the bottom of the control. It does not AutoSize, it manually changes its MaximumSize and PreferredSize after change in the contents.
The form hosts the form using:
cntrl.AutoSize = true;
cntrl.AutoSizeMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoSizeMode.GrowAndShrink;
cntrl.Dock = System.Windows.Forms.DockStyle.Fill;
The form subscribes to a custom control's event that notifies for the preferredHeight and it changes its own Height accordingly.

I'd go with a table layout panel. You can specify two rows by one column with the exact size for the buttons at the top and fill the rest with the bottom. Then put put either a normal panel or a flowlayoutpanel for the dynamic content in that area.

Without knowing the specifics of your problem I find multiple fill docked split containers with one fixed panel and/or a fixed slider usually creates a really handy resizing experience. You can also collapse panels very effectively too.