Using .NET 2.0 with WinForms, I'd like to create a custom, multi-columned menu (similiar to the word 2007 look&feel, but without the ribbon).
My approach was creating a control, and using a left/right docked toolstrip, I have constructed a similar look&feel of a menu. However, there are a few shortcomings of this solution, such as
the control can only be placed, and displayed within the form;
if the form is too small, some area of the control won't be displayed;
the control also have to be manually shown/hidden.
Thus, I'm looking for a way to display this control outside of the boundaries of the application. Creating a new form would result in title-bar deactivating on display, so that's also out. Alternatively, any other approach to create a customized menu would be very welcomed.
Edit: I don't want to use any commercial products for this; and since it's about a simple menu customization, it's not related to Microsoft's ribbon "research" in any way.
unless you are in the business of providing .net components, you should be looking to buy it off the shelf. Its a lot of work getting such a control right - There are already vendors providing this kind of UI. e.g. ComponentOne
if you are trying to build this component as a product, you should look at the link below. Apparently Microsoft has a 'royalty-free' license around the Office UI to protect their R&D investments. As of now you need to tell them that you are using something similar to the Office UI. More of that here
The MenuStrip class has a Renderer property. You can assign your own ToolStripRenderer derived class to customize the painting. It's a fair amount of work.
Related
Ive been working on a C# project for a while now and I fell it needs change its look.
I have found a UI kit that I really like, which can be seen below:
http://medialoot.com/item/transparent-ui-kit/
Does anyone know how to do this?
Thanks
EDIT: Im using WinForms
EDIT2: Maybe I should convert over to WPF? Is this doable?
You can subclass most common controls and draw their appearance yourself. However, unless for novelty applications I doubt your users will thank you for doing so.
Your example is a library of controls. For you to have an appearance such as that you'll have to create or acquire a similar library of controls and replace all your controls in your project to get that appearance.
If you want to update colors (background, foreground, etc.) and such you can make a class that recurses through controls and sets the settings using reflection and a switch statement to process each control. Then just run this on each form before you show it. One word of caution about this, some controls don't respect your changes and get overridden with themes from the OS (datetimerpicker being the biggest culprit). You'll also need to consider whether your users will appreciate the extra work put in for color/appearance changes.
If you don't have very good design skill and have a good know how about creating such templates, its better to buy them.
And C# is just a language. You're looking to create templates and skins for either for ASP.NET website/application or for windows forms.
Have a look at DevExpress Skins
If you can afford it.
I'd like to get ahead of the pack and start making some custom C# controls and components for Metro (Win8), but I can't find any documentation or blog posts on how to start, or even if it's possible right now.
Are metro controls just WPF controls? I'm not yet a WPF developer; creating a custom user control looks straightforward, but that project type doesn't exist in the Windows 8 developer preview. So, are WPF custom user controls (VS2010) the project type I should use for creating my Metro controls? Beyond that, I can't find any documentation on how to create a component for use in WPF/Metro; can you create one, or would it just be a custom user control that isn't visible? (I was hoping for some type of component container like the one winforms use; are components for Metro now only class libraries, and don't include designer support anymore?)
It's ... very difficult right now. There's no way to override OnRender or the like for a control, ie to create code to render a control with a custom appearance. However, you can create a custom template. Anything you can do in the template is legal, and that's how you have to approach custom controls.
One other option is to generate your UI using either raster (Bitmap) or vector (Windows.UI.Xaml.Shape?) components directly and build up your UI like that. Bleh.
Win8 Metro is a lot like WPF, but it isn't a subset. Similar but very different. Many WPF controls didn't make the transition to Win8 Metro; the same level of rendering control isn't available; and some system features (like advanced font rendering) aren't there. All this might change in coming releases, but right now it looks like Microsoft is trying to restrain developers from creating custom UI controls.
I've been designing a pretty complicated avionics application. The thing is, it has many menu buttons to be clicked (12 to be exact) and each one of them perform a different action. For instance, one could be a login panel and the other one a PDF reader. How could I organize this programmatically?
Currently, I've been setting each item in a panel and setting it to visible or invisible, according to the active or clicked item.
How would you guys do this?
Thanks in advance!
You might consider a FlowLayoutPanel, although I'm not sure how flexible it would be in meeting your requirements. If you set your panels up with docking properties, you should be able to manage.
I would also recommend using a UserControl to separate code and functionality. If panels need to communicate, implement the observer/observable pattern instead of subscribing to events between user controls.
Like IAbstract says, you should consider separating the different UI elements as UserControls. You can then do things like use a factory to construct them and add them to your window as required.
I've found this sort of approach, used with a Model-View-Presenter type pattern, works really well for WinForms apps with dynamic user interfaces.
I created a TabControl using Windows Forms but the tab headers look very ugly. I want to make them with rounded corners and also create some space between two tab headers. Can anyone please tell how it can be done using C#.
Thanks,
gary
You'll want to do one of a few things:
Make your own custom control that inherits from TabControl and overrides its render method.
Download a third-party custom tab control that does what you want.
Switch to WPF, which gives you some more flexibility in the way of creating and styling controls.
There isn't a way to do this with System.Windows.Forms.TabControl out of the box, so you'll have to either live with what you've got, or roll your own.
Not to spark any heated debate, but WinForms is an aging API. If you're building a brand new application and/or learning a UI framework for the first time, you might consider using WPF instead. For legacy code, it's fine to maintain WinForms of course.
The System.Windows.Forms.TabControl class is just a wrapper around the Windows COMCTL32 tab control. Unfortunately, that control doesn't provide much in the way of customization options. You'll have to switch controls, either to WPF, custom code, or some third-party product.
I have a winforms application where users will be creating stock items, and a time of creation there are a number of different things that need to happen.
I think the UI for this should probably be a wizard of some kind, but I'm unsure as to the best way to achieve this. I have seen a couple of 3rd party Wizard controls, and I have also seen manual implementations of making panel visible/invisible.
What are the best ways that people have used in the past, that are easy to implement, and also make it easy to add "pages" to the wizard later on if needed?
I know this answer has already been accepted, but I just found a better Wizard control that's free, and of course, since it's on CodeProject, includes the source, so you can modify it if it's not exactly what you want. I'm adding this as an answer for the next person to stumble across this question looking for a good Wizard control.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/DesignTimeWizard.aspx
Here are a few more resources you should check out:
This DevExpress WinForms control: http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WinForms/Wizard/
A home-grown wizards framework: http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/articles/60155.aspx
A wizard framework by Shawn Wildermut part of the Chris Sells's Genghis framework: http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/genghis/
Use a tab-control inside a form.
Change back color to "Control" in all tab-pages.
Set "appearance" to flat buttons to get rid of the white border-stuff.
Hide the tabs by sizing the entire control so that the tabs gets pushed up "under" the title bar of the form. If you need other controls (or banner maybe) above the tab-control, then instead hide the tabs with a panel-control or similar.
Childplay to code logic for back/next buttons and very easy to extend with new pages.
Take a look at this article on MSDN about "inductive user interfaces". It describes a framework (and provides the code to download) based on UserControls that give you "navigation" within a form. Perfect for designing wizards.
The easiest way to create a wizard dialog is to use one of the third-party versions available that handle all of the "hard stuff" (the page navigation, UI framework, etc.) for you. The one I like the most is from Divelements; they have both a WinForms and a WPF version.