[Narwin]

Intro

Maybe most of you noticed that some default controls that are already exist in VS has some properties while others don't, for i.e : Panel is a common control that maybe everyone of us used even for once, it inherts ScrollableControl that has some properties different than control properties, in short when you add a panel to you project forms you simply see a small traingle in right top corner of the panel which is "Dock in Parent Container" property, have you ever thought how can do this in Custom for our controls ?, in 3 lessons I'll try to tech you some GDI Techniques, and I'll start with control designer class, which has a lot of benefits for GDI Developers , unfortunately I don't saw anyone here use it even for once (includes me).

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[ GDI Development ]

Contains Three Lessons :

Spoiler (Click to View)

1. Control Designer.
   


2. Action List.
   


3. Chlid Classes.
   

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Control Designer

From MSDN : ControlDesigner provides a base class for designers of components that derive from Control. In addition to the methods and functionality inherited from the ComponentDesigner class, ControlDesigner provides additional methods to support extending and altering the behavior of an associated Control at design time.

As I said Control Designer has a lot of benefits and lot of features that can be found here.

in this tutorial I will show one of the methods of Control Designer effect which really important for GDI Developers and the users also and its PostFilterProperties

with PostFilterProperties we can change and remove any properties of a custom control.

Q : what is the need of removing properties ?
- for the most custom controls you just inherit the control base class which has a lot of none-needed properties , like we don't need the "Background Image" property in evrey control's PropertyGrid , by this we can simply remove the un-wanted properties.

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Let's turn this into the code

guess we have a custom button

C#.NET

Spoiler (Click to View)

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Visual Basic.NET

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Let's say we want to remove 4 properties of this control.

1. BackgroundImage
   


2. BackgroundImageLayout
   


3. Visible
   


4. Dock
   

we will use "PostFilterProperties" method.

for being much easy we will store all those 4 properties above in array.

C#.NET

Code

private readonly string[] _PropertiesToRemove = { "BackgroundImage" , "BackgroundImageLayout", "Visible", "Dock" };

Visual Basic.NET

Code

Private ReadOnly _PropertiesToRemove As String() = new String(){ "BackgroundImage" , "BackgroundImageLayout", "Visible", "Dock" }

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now we will create a class for the designer and inherit the ControlDsigner

Note : You need you import "System.Design" as referense.

C#.NET

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Visual Basic.NET

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now let's join this class with the Custom Control above. for that we will go to the top of custom control and add this line :

C#.NET

Code

[System.ComponentModel.Designer(typeof(NButtonDesigner))]

Visual Basic.NET

Code

<System.ComponentModel.Designer(GetType(NButtonDesigner))>

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The Whole Code :

C#.NET

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Visual Basic.NET

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Result

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you can remove all properties except those you want to remain

C#.NET

Spoiler (Click to View)


Visual Basic.NET

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Result

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There are a lot of useful usings of ControlDsigner but this is enough for now.

Enjoy!

[tweety]

Who the hell still uses winforms lol

[Narwin]

Who the hell still uses winforms lol

What's wrong with WinForms ?

[xxdarklord65xx]

thanks for sharing nice stuff mate .
i hope if u do more gdi posts would be great

[Cuthbert]

Who the hell still uses winforms lol

WinForms is the best for quick GUI development.
Could you recommend something better?

[sdk]

WinForms is the best for quick GUI development.
Could you recommend something better?

Personally I love to fuck with WPF it''s so easy to design something simple.

About 5-10mins of design work and thats cause I kept getting lost in a Netflix show :)
Spoiler (Click to View)
Sorry for the blurs still a work in progress (for a new thing not an already out thing :))



But to op nice tut keep up the good work

[Cuthbert]

Personally I love to fuck with WPF it''s so easy to design something simple.

About 5-10mins of design work and thats cause I kept getting lost in a Netflix show :)
Spoiler (Click to View)
Sorry for the blurs still a work in progress (for a new thing not an already out thing :))



But to op nice tut keep up the good work

Isn't WPF quite time consuming to learn and develop, it's essentially learning a whole different language just for a GUI?

[sdk]

Isn't WPF quite time consuming to learn and develop, it's essentially learning a whole different language just for a GUI?

It's just XAML, took me a day or two to pick it up. I used to be big into Android dev so the whole XML view based development wasn't new to me.

In my eyes it's worth it to be able to make such easy designs and they are unique, especially if you do work for people, you can provide unique "themes" per person

[uint32]

I usually prefer to avoid ControlDesigner, you can achieve the same effect using the EditorBrowsable (MSDN) and Browsable (MSDN) attributes without over-complicating your code with long string arrays. This also allows you more functionality for runtime handling and such.

[Narwin]

I usually prefer to avoid ControlDesigner, you can achieve the same effect using the EditorBrowsable (MSDN) and Browsable (MSDN) attributes without over-complicating your code with long string arrays. This also allows you more functionality for runtime handling and such.

if you use EditorBrowsable or just Browsable you need to declare every property you want to hide , which is make the job more difficult as I see.

and also there is another useful trick when you use ControlDesigner (Action Lists) which I mention it in the next tutorial.

[uint32]

if you use EditorBrowsable or just Browsable you need to declare every property you want to hide , which is make the job more difficult as I see.

and also there is another useful trick when you use ControlDesigner (Action Lists) which I mention it in the next tutorial.

It isn't much more difficult, just takes some more space. I do prefer to take the long path because if you need to rename a member and it's placed in a string literal, IntelliSense won't be able to find the reference and won't perform the rename in the string and that can lead to other errors that are harder to trace.
Recreating the property also allows you to control it's functionality at runtime; throwing exceptions, controlling input...
The only advantage I see to using ControlDesigner is to conditionally hide members based on user input and such.

[Narwin]

It isn't much more difficult, just takes some more space. I do prefer to take the long path because if you need to rename a member and it's placed in a string literal, IntelliSense won't be able to find the reference and won't perform the rename in the string and that can lead to other errors that are harder to trace.
Recreating the property also allows you to control it's functionality at runtime; throwing exceptions, controlling input...
The only advantage I see to using ControlDesigner is to conditionally hide members based on user input and such.

let's you have a lot of custom controls and which everyone of them inherit a Control and you want to hide some shared properties in every control, you need to declare them separetely or try to create a base class in for then inherit it but it still makes no differense with ControlDesigner, every property you hide inside it you can use it in runtime or change it, this just clearify the ProperyGrid from un-wanted properties, and as I said you need the ControlDesigner for implementing the ActionLists with make the jobs much easier and the user dosn't need to go for ProperyGrid to change a property value.

[0xDEAD10CC]

It isn't much more difficult, just takes some more space. I do prefer to take the long path because if you need to rename a member and it's placed in a string literal, IntelliSense won't be able to find the reference and won't perform the rename in the string and that can lead to other errors that are harder to trace.
Recreating the property also allows you to control it's functionality at runtime; throwing exceptions, controlling input...
The only advantage I see to using ControlDesigner is to conditionally hide members based on user input and such.

Just as a note, this is why C# has nameof().

[cristlol]

Bookmarked!

Nice tutorial would be great if you post more =p

Thanks for sharing man.

[sh@rp]

Very nice tut. keep up the good work.
thank you very much. ;)