Articles filed in category 'UI Design'

.Finalize() - Wasting Energy, and Rotating Things

Software vendors and conferences would tell you that the desktop is dead, but if you’re a working consultant, you know that’s not true. Mike dives into a great tool using WinForms to show you what you’ve been missing.

Did you know that you can create a simple one-line menu system using two C# classes and a little bit of Razor code in an MVC page to create a hierarchical menu structure for drop-down menus? Paul shows you how.

If you ever thought you’d like to develop the Next Big Thing, you’ll need Q’s advice about how to get started and what to do before you start writing code.

At Mix 2007 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) to much fanfare. Silverlight is very intriguing in concept, as it further travels the path previously laid out by WPF (Silverlight’s big brother), and it aims to bring the worlds of Windows and Web development, as well as the worlds of software development and graphical design, much closer together. As more and more details emerge (and the first released version is now available), it beco...mes clear that Silverlight is not just an intriguing concept, but it is for real! Markus discusses Silverlight concepts in this article.See More

We know what you’re thinking: Why should I read an article about the fundamentals of accessibility?Well, if you already know the percentage of computer users who have disabilities, can name at least ten different categories of assistive technologies, and can describe the key concepts involved in designing an accessible application, then you can probably skip to the next article. However, if you’re unsure what accessible technology is, then take a few minutes and keep rea...ding. You’ll learn about the main concepts around accessible technology, the people they help, and things you can do to help them interact smoothly and successfully with each other.See More

One new features in Visual Studio 2005 is the support for smart tags. A smart tag is a panel that displays next to a control and contains a list of commonly used properties.

By now you should have heard of several new acronyms that are usually associated with Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn).

CoDe Focus Mobile Editorial by Markus Egger

The Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) expands the market for PC games that run on Microsoft® Windows® XP, as long as developers consider certain design requirements to ensure a good user experience. In most cases, a single version of games can span both the UMPC and traditional PC platforms.

If you have been following this series of CODE Framework articles, you are already aware that CODE Framework provides the ability to use, create, and customize awesome-looking WPF application themes that also make apps maintainable and easy to build. But not everyone wants to create brand new Themes or customize existing ones. Instead, why not just use one of the great themes that ship in the box?

Creating custom column types for the DataGridView control isn’t nearly as tricky as it once was.In this article, you’ll learn how to take advantage of inheritance to create your own bar graph column in a grid cell.

Those helpful buttons for minimize, maximize, and close functions need to be added to your WPF pages if you don’t want to crowd your user’s screen. Paul shows you how.

If you haven't heard, accessibility is one of the most important aspects of a Web site experience.By using the accessibility features in Silverlight™ 2, you can provide the best experience for all users. Building a rich Internet experience can be a daunting task when you have to balance a cool visual design with usability.

Sometimes an application needs to interact with the user interface (UI) of a second application.The first application might be a test application that drives the UI of the target to run through some automated tests. It might describe the UI out loud, as an aid to users that are blind. It might be a speech application that allows users to give vocal commands. In each of these cases, the application needs a way to inspect and interact with the UI of the system and other running applications.

Software applications have a lifespan. Some, like utility applications that do nothing more than patch an existing application to fix a bug, are quite short. Others, like games, live only slightly longer. Then there are those applications that live on for decades, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Internal business applications that are used to automate and track processes often have long lifespans as well. As developers, we add to or adjust the application’s u...ser interface to account for new features, but rarely do we reconsider the interface as a whole. Why? Likely because we get used to the original user interface we created and don’t see any reason to change it. But complacency is generally not viewed as a virtue.See More

You know you should be moving code out from behind your forms, windows and web pages and into stand-alone classes. Everyone preaches that this is what to do, everyone shows you examples of ViewModel classes, but no one really shows you a real-world example of how to get rid of the code behind.

Ten years after the release of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is stirring the pot again with a new development platform that set’s to focus your talents on what everyone is betting is the next big thing, mobile devices; specifically in this case, tablets. The Windows Runtime, or WinRT, is the foundation for the development of applications designed to target Windows 8-driven touch-enabled devices, but what does that mean for .NET developers and their existing skill sets?

I think we’re making progress toward the goal of bending computers to conform to human factors rather than bending my human factors to conform to the way computers accept input.Ultimately, our brains will be plugged directly into “the grid,” but until then, users still have to learn how to type, control a mouse, and press buttons in certain sequences. The arrival of the Windows Vista™ operating system with Microsoft® Windows® Tablet and Touch Technology is another step t...oward really natural computing.See More

While custom controls are introduced every day, not all of them are easily accessible.This article provides a quick summary of Microsoft® technologies that help make Win32-based custom controls programmatically accessible. Techniques range from implementing UI Automation, to creating or overriding properties with Dynamic Annotation, to using the new IAccessibleEx interface to close the gap between UI Automation and Microsoft Active Accessibility®.

Close your eyes, ignore your mouse, navigate with your keyboard, and rely on your ears alone. Now try to use an application you’ve built or tested. Can you?The few informal tests described in this article can expose a plethora of usability and accessibility shortcomings, oversights, and other issues in your application. But how do you test, assess, and rectify them?

Creating a natural user interface requires designers, testers, and developers working in concert to develop the right support that makes multi-modal access to an operating system and applications possible.To assist in this work through the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), Microsoft® released its UI Automation Specifications with a Community Promise and released testing tools as open source projects via CodePlex. Microsoft is committed to interoperable accessibility.

One of the painful realities of software is that as it becomes increasingly rich with features, it becomes increasingly difficult to use.Despite the best intentions of software companies to design usable software, there is often a large conceptual gap between what users know and what software designers expect users to know. For a simple application, the gap may be small. For complex applications, the conceptual gap can be huge. As this conceptual gap widens, users are mo...re likely to rely on software documentation and support services, resulting in decreased user productivity.See More

Do you ever feel like you’re beating your head against a wall? I know I do; quite often, in fact. It seems like developers spend half of their time bending technology to their purposes when the technology doesn’t really quite fit. Well, I’m actually thinking of one problem in particular right now, namely that of validation. Can you think of a more boring topic? There are few, but I think you can agree that it is an extremely important one in business software.

Retaining a single set of user settings for your application is easy.Retaining multiple sets of user settings is much more challenging.

The Silverlight ListBox is much more than you may think. When most people think of a ListBox they typically think of just a simple control that displays rows of text. However, the Silverlight ListBox is one of the most flexible controls you will find. I tend to think of the ListBox as similar to the ASP.NET Repeater control as it too is very flexible. In this article, I will show you six different ways to display data in a Silverlight ListBox.

Markus Egger discusses the current State of WPF and Silverlight and the overall importance and acceptance of these technologies.

Now in its sixth major release, Virtual Earth offers an entire world of opportunities for innovative Web-based mapping.Microsoft’s premier Web-based mapping solution has undergone upgrades to it user interface, compatibility, and functionality making it an ideal time to get started with the platform or upgrade your existing application. Let’s explore what’s new and what has changed in this latest release.

Originally published as a blog post - Fixing Web UI

Windows® 7 offers end-to-end accessibility with better performance, seamless interoperability, and improved framework design.

Markus Egger discusses screen resolutions.

While general accessibility requirements (such as font colors in UI rendering) are important, programmatic access to the graphical user interface (GUI) is a crucial element to improving accessibility.On the Windows® operating system, Microsoft® Active Accessibility® and User Interface (UI) Automation support this programmatic access. This article provides a quick overview of Windows Automation API 3.0 featured in Windows 7.While general accessibility requirements (such a...s font colors in UI rendering) are important, programmatic access to the graphical user interface (GUI) is a crucial element to improving accessibility.On the Windows® operating system, Microsoft® Active Accessibility® and User Interface (UI) Automation support this programmatic access. This article provides a quick overview of Windows Automation API 3.0 featured in Windows 7.See More

As readers of this magazine, you are all experts at certain facets of software development, be it for the desktop, the web, SQL Server and now mobile platforms. Mobile programming was a fairly arcane development arena up until the recent announcement of Windows Phone 7 (WP7). Prior to WP7, you had to become intimately familiar with the myriad platforms and form factors available and write your programs to each of those phones. With the advent of WP7, Microsoft is now con...trolling the hardware capabilities of the phone making it much easier to develop for these platforms. You can now also leverage existing skills in Silverlight and XNA to write your apps. But the question always remains: how do I get started and what is the best way to write for the new WP7? In a previous article, <i>CODE Magazine </i>Jan/Feb 2011, I showed you what to do to get started; now I want to show you the best way to apply what you have learned in that article. I will use Silverlight, the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, and Silverlight Unit testing to build a sample app.See More

The iPhone is one of the most compelling and exciting user interfaces to appear on any consumer electronic device, with many innovations that make it a pleasure to use. How can you deliver a similar experience with your .NET applications?This article demonstrates how you can implement these features in your .NET applications in a step-by-step format as you recreate the iPhone interface using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology with both Visual Studio 2008 an...d Microsoft Expression Blend.See More

Do you have a complex custom control that you want to make programmatically accessible, but you aren’t sure how? Custom controls, by their nature, tend to be very diverse: each is typically written for a specific purpose, making it difficult to generalize implementation details. How do you know what to implement? You should consider supporting accessibility for any custom control that performs its own rendering and input management-routing mouse and keyboard input-within the HWND that it owns.

Just when you think a container is simple, your user resizes the screen and mayhem ensues. If you want to know what happened—or prevent it, better yet—read Markus’ piece about the XAML layout engine.

XAML properties don’t always behave as you think they might. Markus explains how they work and shows you some nifty ways to use these powerful tools.