Pedro Silva's Blog : Window Forms

ListView Performance Posts

PedroSilva — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:56:00 GMT

I've been reading a series of ListView performance posts by HippieTim. He's done a really good job of showing different ways of using ListViews and how they perform compared to one another. And, recommendations for getting good perf with your ListView.

I'm really intrigued by the virtual ListView option for really long lists. I'm going to give that one a try in the near future.

I don't know if he has more posts planned on this topic, but I'll be keeping an eye out for some more - just in case.

List of WinForms and C# Links

PedroSilva — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:40:00 GMT

There's been lots of WinForms and C# related content posted recently, and I have a list of things that I had meant to blog about, but never got around to. I'm going to post of list of some of these, so I can clear my backlog, keep track of them, and let other folks know about them...

Priority Queue: A priority queue using the skip list data structure.
XmlGridControl: this program uses code generation and CodeDom manipulation to edit XML data in the PropertyGrid.
Page Turn Effect: This article demonstrates how to use GDI+ to create a page turn effect.
TabControl Owner Drawn: creating composite custom controls with design-time support.
Extended ListView: An extended ListView control that can show multiple images on subitems, lets the user edit subitems with user-defined controls, contains boolean subitems and can columns can be sorted by date, number and string.
NumberPicker Control: a control that allows for easy number entering.
ToolStripColorButton: a color picker that is parented on a WinForms ToolStrip.

Multimedia Timer for the .NET Framework

PedroSilva — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:49:00 GMT

I'm always a big fan of new .NET wrappers for Win32 APIs that haven't been made part of the framework. And, I usually link to projects that implement that interop layer. Doing interop can be tough, so having code that someone's written for it is very useful.

Here's a link to a CodeProject the wraps the Win32 Multimedia Timer for use in your .NET applications.

Check Out Gel Buttons for Winforms

PedroSilva — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:40:00 GMT

Chris Jackson has two posts about Gel Buttons that he's created for WinForms. They look really good and implement design-time support, so they're good examples on how to do that as well.

Not sure if there are any more parts to this, but so far they've been interesting posts.

Using 'Open With' System Dialog in C#

PedroSilva — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:05:00 GMT

Vivek has a project where he's written the interop layer to access the Windows shell's 'Open With' Dialog -- the one where you can associate a file extension with the application that should open it. It's a dialog that you may find useful in one of your applications, but isn't supported in the .NET libraries.

Having the interop and marshalling code, lets you call ShellExecuteEx, which you may find other uses for.

VS.Net 2005 Design-Time Integration

PedroSilva — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 22:43:00 GMT

Doing design-time integration for components and controls is always a big request. Being able drop a control or component in something like the WinForms designer, lets developers visualize what things will look like as they change properties.

The following article gives a good overview of the architecture used to make components design-time editable. And, it discusses things like: type converters, UI type converters, custom designers, and the design-time attributes.

Using XBox 360 Controller in C#

PedroSilva — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:46:00 GMT

Here's a very cool sample that uses Managed DirectX to support input from the new XBox 360 controller in a simple Windows Form in C#.

Paul Stubbs : MDX: XBOX 360 Controller Windows Forms Application

[via Greg]

CodeProject Gradient Editor

PedroSilva — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:07:00 GMT

Sameera has an interesting article on CodeProject about creating a Gradient Editor control that lets you pick the colors and attributes for a gradient fill. It's similar to features that you've probably seen in professional drawing applications, like Photoshop.

Radio Button in a .NET 2.0 MenuStrip

PedroSilva — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:39:00 GMT

I just ran into a problem doing this and found a great post about how to work around it. It appears that the MenuStrip doesn't support radio button items be default, but you can create a radio button effect by using the ToolStripMenuItem.Checked property and some drawing.

Minimize to System Tray Revisited

PedroSilva — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 19:51:00 GMT

Earlier in the week, I posted about a project that implemented system tray support for .NET applications. That seems like a good project, but it's a bit complicated.

I was just trying to add this functionality to an app that I've been playing around with, and I found another sources that has a more straight-forward way of doing it. This Developer.com article gives a very clear step-by-step process for minimizing a . NET application to the system tray. It only took about 5 minutes to implement after I found the article (that took significantly longer).

Using My Namespace for Splash Screen

PedroSilva — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:43:00 GMT

I posted earlier about using the My namespace in VS 2005 to create a single instance application in C#. You can also do a similar thing to use the My functionality for displaying a splash screen when your .NET application is loading.

Here is Tyler's post on how to do this in VB, but if you include Microsoft.VisualBasic reference into your C# project, you should also be able to get this to work for C# WinForms projects. Unfortunately, there isn't the same support for it in the C# Project property page, but you can do it in code. I'll try to code this up and post it here in C#, when I have a chance.

.NET Application Running on the System Tray

PedroSilva — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:46:00 GMT

Here's a link to sample code by Chris Szurgot for creating an application that can be placed on the system tray. It's become much more common to have things on the system tray recently, and this code allows you to implement this feature using .NET 2.0.

I haven't had a chance to use the code yet, but there's a project that I'm playing with where this code would be useful, so I hope to try it out soon.

Using Settings in VS 2005 to Save Window Position

PedroSilva — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:38:00 GMT

Here is a good article on how to use Application Settings to save a windows size, location, and state. There were lots of good improvements to Application Settings in VS 2005, and now it's easier to use them in WinForms applications for custom data.

Also, today is my last day at work for the year. I'm out on vacation until the start of the year, so Merry Christmas. I might post while I'm out if anything interesting happens...

SplitButton WinForms Control

PedroSilva — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:42:00 GMT

Here's some sample code by jfoscoding that creates a split button, with part of it behaving like a button and the other part flys out a menu. It's pretty useful, and you've probably seen similar buttons on toolbars and dialogs.

RSS Feed Authoring Tool

PedroSilva — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:48:00 GMT

Duncan MacKenzie created a tool to create an RSS 2.0 file from user entered data rather than as a feed from a blogging engine. Sometimes you have content that you want a feed for without it necessarily being in your blogging engine. Duncan created this for use on MSDN, so that some of they're article headlines could be in an RSS feed even if they weren't in the content management system.

It's pretty cool, so if you need to produce RSS files for content outside of a blogging engine, this could be useful.