Articles filed in category 'WinForms'

Finalize Column Sept/Oct 2005 Ken Getz

Rick examines what is—and isn’t—coming in .NET Core Runtime. You’ll get to put this knowledge to good use as you build a small app, too.

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.

Paul begins a new series of articles on how to create a WPF business application. This first one teaches how to use a message broker to eliminate strong coupling between classes, how to display status and information to the user while resources are loading, and how to load user controls onto a single window while aggregating controls and building a large screen.

Many developers have a dream: easy and efficient data binding.To be really quick and profitable, RAD (rapid application development) tools and techniques must be strong in data binding. They must provide a programming interface that is both easy to use and effective. Easy design-time composition of user interfaces; effective support of complex scenarios of interrelated data, dependencies, and filtering. In Windows Forms, the data binding machinery is highly sophisticated... and designed to meet common needs of former client/server applications, now migrating to the more modern .NET multi-tier design. This article reviews common Windows Forms data binding techniques and provides answers and explanations.See More

The first article in this series detailed how to build data-aware forms in Visual Studio .NET using the Data Form Wizard. It demonstrated how easy it is to build forms using a point-and-click interface. You also learned that the generated form was especially suited to production development. This article continues where that article left off and introduces you to techniques to improve data-aware forms created with the Data Form Wizard.

Windows Forms applications often require some sort of asynchronous invocation option.You rarely want to block the user interface while a lengthy operation executes in the background. Windows Forms pose a set of complicated design and implementation issues when it comes to asynchronous method invocation and multithreading due to the underlying Windows messages processing. Although .NET does provide a uniform asynchronous invocation mechanism (described in my article, "Asy...nchronous .NET Programming", CoDe Magazine, May 2003) you cannot apply it as-is in a Windows Forms application. To address this problem, the next version of .NET (version 2.0, code-name Whidbey) provides a new component designed to ease the task of developing asynchronous Windows Forms applications. This article starts by describing the current asynchronous programming model available to Windows Forms developers. Then, not only does this article describe the Whidbey solution, it also provides a .NET 1.1 implementation of the solution so that you can take advantage of this superior programming model today and ease the transition into Windows Forms 2.0 in the future.See More

.NET provides new tools to make deployment of fat client .NET applications easier.This article describes the basics of .NET Auto-Deployment technology and the security mechanism that prevents users from inadvertently running code distributed by hackers and virus writers.

When I first met the ASP.NET DataGrid control, it was love at first sight. Together we built several applications, taught dozens of classes, published countless articles and tips; we even wrote a book. I can say with no fear of lying that we have an intimate knowledge of each other. When I need the Web DataGrid to perform some rather odd task, I only have to cast a glance (or two, if the task is quite complicated.) With this in mind, I enthusiastically accepted a proposa...l from one of my clients: Build a Windows Forms application with grid functionalities. Although at the time I had no serious experience with the Windows Forms DataGrid control, I took the gig because I thought a Windows DataGrid works more or less the same as an ASP.NET DataGrid. Next, hardly containing some genuine enthusiasm, I optimistically conjectured it could have been even easier smart controls are handiest compared to HTML markup. See More

Using Visual Studio 2005, create a new Windows application by choosing New Project from the File menu. Click on the Visual Basic (Windows) project type, and select the Windows Application template. Call the new app something like Databinding, and click OK.

Visual Studio 2005 will ship some great new controls, but suppose you want your own control to play in the Data Sources Window?In this article, I'll explain how the Data Sources Window in Visual Studio 2005 will enable you to extend the list of controls supported for Drag Once Databinding. I'll show you how to create a PhoneBox control and an AddressBlock UserControl.

Using the new Data Sources Window in Visual Studio 2005, developers can now drag columns of their typed DataSets or properties of their own business objects directly to their form. Visual Studio 2005 will create, name, and label controls for each bound property. For those that prefer to lay out the forms with the toolbox, developers can use "Connect the Dots DataBinding" to drag and drop from the Data Sources Window onto their existing controls.

If you want to capture your users' imaginations, enable drag-and-drop.Drag-and-drop doesn't fulfill requirements, but it contributes to making your application appear more professional and easy to use. In Windows Forms applications, drag-and-drop operations consist mostly of handling a series of events. By accomplishing a few mandatory steps and working with the information available in the event arguments, you can easily facilitate dragging and dropping files, text, and... any other sort of serializable data objects. This article demonstrates how to import files from the Windows shell and how to enhance some UI controls to make them accept input via drag-and-drop. Notable examples are the TextBox and the PictureBox controls.See More

Catering to the strength of the third-party .NET component market and the power of the .NET Framework itself, Microsoft includes several powerful new WinForm controls in the Base Class Libraries for Windows application development.The WinForm controls provided by the .NET Framework 1.1 are extremely useful, and the framework for developing new custom controls provided in 1.1 is very strong, but sometimes the development community expects more out-of-the box. Many needs o...f the development community are satisfied by the basic collection of WinForm controls while some developers have voiced their need for more functionality. Microsoft appears ready to rise to the occasion with the inclusion of many new WinForm controls.See More

There was a time, not too long ago, when browser-based user interfaces were considered both the status quo and the Next Great Thing.The demand for Windows Forms-based applications started to dwindle as the developer community fully embraced browser/server applications with their centralized server components and ubiquitous user interfaces. .NET, however, brings a much more powerful library of distributed communication technologies (such as Web services and remoting). As ...a result, .NET developers are seeing some of these traditionally browser-based applications becoming, more simply, Web-enabled and less tied to a browser. In short, developers can now see a very real business case for building distributed applications on Windows Forms technology.See More

Create a base form class to ensure that all of the forms in your application behave consistently. This technique minimizes the amount of repetitive code you need to write to manage the user's interaction with your forms.

It's a small world.For the price of a nice pair of shoes, you can get on a plane, have dinner, watch a movie, sleep a few hours, and wake up on another continent. Your software can travel even more easily. When it gets there, will it be ready to go to work?

The Process class allows you to gain full control over system processes.You can start and stop processes and retrieve information about running processes such as the list of loaded modules and the characteristics of the memory occupied. The class also features handy methods to know whether a process is responding or has just exited and with which return code. Programmers also have full control over the style of the window the process runs in. After an overview of the cap...abilities of the Process class, this article demonstrates how to hide running console processes, monitor their execution, and capture any output. I'll use this strategy to create a sample Compression class to use with WinZip and gzip (popular tools for compressing data).See More

Since the earliest versions of the Windows operating system, all Windows have been rectangular.However, the number of applications that break out of this boring mold is rising. Even Microsoft, the king of rectangularity, is starting to create applications that use shaped windows, such as Media Player. Unfortunately, creating shaped forms has always been quite tricky. Until now that is! The .NET Framework and the Windows Forms package in particular make it easy to produce... forms that have rather sophisticated shapes.See More

Two-way data binding can save you a ton of coding, as long as you can get the bound controls to behave the way you want them to.Using the BindingSource and Binding objects in .NET 2.0, getting what you expect in minimal code becomes a whole lot easier. In this article, I will explore how to use the BindingSource and Binding objects to set up associations between complex data sources and bound controls. I'll show you how to keep multiple controls that are bound to the sam...e data source synchronized, and how to control the formatting and parsing of the data in those controls.See More

New developers often struggle with the .NET DataGrid when trying to replicate grid functionality from other platforms.More experienced developers lament the deficiencies of the .NET DataGrid to address end user requirements. Consequently, many developers seek sophisticated third-party alternatives. In this article, I'll present a set of classes for the DataGrid to help address some of the more common struggles. Although third-party tools always offer more capabilities th...an a native control, this article also demonstrates how it's possible for you to implement some of the functions found in these third-party tools.See More

In graphical user interfaces such as Microsoft Windows, drawing on the screen is an important task.Everything displayed on the screen is based on simple drawing operations. Often, environments such as Visual Basic abstract those drawing operations away from the developer. However, the same drawing operations still take place under the hood. In Visual Studio .NET, developers have easy access to that drawing functionality whenever they need it through a technology called G...DI+. Using GDI+, developers can easily perform drawing operations such as generating graphs or building custom controls.See More

If you have been involved in a new software development project during the last five years ? and if you read this article, chances are you have ? then you have probably been faced with the question "Web application or Windows® UI?" And in the vast majority of cases, the answer to this question was probably "Web application." For modern, enterprise-wide systems there were simply many reasons and issues that made it hard to implement the desired feature set in a convention...al Windows application and deploy it in a reasonable manner. At this point, the advantages and disadvantages of each application type are well understood, and decisions are easy to make. Or are they?See More

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

It’s not enough that creating apps using .NET Core is better than ever before. Now, Olia shows us how with .NET Core 3, upgrading existing apps is easier, too.

Markus Egger discusses user interface technologies developers should familiarize themselves with.

GDI+ is a technology that developers generally associate with Windows Forms applications because they use it to draw anything on the screen from custom controls to diagrams.However, you can also use GDI+ in ASP.NET Web applications whenever you want to serve up dynamic images. You can use GDI+ to create dynamic banners, photo albums, graphs, diagrams, and more.

People often think of HTML as the sole domain for Web applications.But HTML's versatile display attributes are also very useful for handling data display of all sorts in desktop applications. The Visual Studio .NET start page is a good example. Coupled with a scripting/template mechanism you can build highly extendable applications that would be very difficult to build using standard Windows controls. In this article, Rick introduces how to host the ASP.NET runtime in de...sktop applications and utilize this technology in a completely client-side application using the Web Browser control.See More

Markus Egger discusses the use of inheritance in Visual Studio .NET applications, in particular WinForms apps.

All developers always welcome new controls and components.When a big new development tool ships (say, one as big as Visual Studio 2005) many developers look at what's missing in the toolbox even before they take a thoughtful look at what's in. Frankly, the toolbox for Windows Forms applications was already pretty rich in Visual Studio .NET 2003, but it will be even richer when the next version ships. In this article, I'll take you on a whistle-stop tour of the new contro...ls slated for Windows Forms 2.0 to make writing code more productive and pleasant than ever.See More

In this article, Karl uncovers a bundle of nifty Windows Form tricks.