The treegrid has now a partial editing support (it remains to implement the full parsing and formatting system).

In parallel I started to add another type of column (in addition of the regular string one): The ComboBox column. It allows to select a value within a list and to assign it to a cell.

ComboBox supports horizontal and vertical resizing.

A small screenshot to illustrate:

You can get a free copy if you belong to one of the 2 following case:

You have a .net focused blog

If you have a blog talking about .net technologies, you are probably qualified to get a free copy of SharpWidgetsUI. Your blog just needs to have at least 150 subscribers.

If it is your case:

Send us :

• Your name
• Your blog statistics
• The url of your blog

You are an MVP

If you are a current MVP,

send us:

• Your name
• Your MVP category

If you are planning to use our toolkit for educational purpose, please contact-us.

The version 1.0.1 of SharpWidgetsUI has been released. It includes minor fixes. It is recommended to install this upgrade.

Changes:

• Better looking caption bar buttons
• Bug in super tooltips when showing over a popup fixed
• Small change in the licensing system.
• Automatic installation of components in Visual Studio Toolbox (2005 & 2008, >= professional version)

It can be downloaded here: http://www.aflava.com/download.php 

Here is the first summary of what has been done for the future treegrid component.

The general architecture of the component has been designed, keeping in mind to have at the end something lightweight but powerful. I do not want to have a clone of competitor grids that can do a lot but are really heavy and complex.

What has been already developed:

• Selection management
• Support of multiple selections
• Different selection granularity (cell level, row level, …)
• Vertical optimized scrolling
• Checkbox support
• Sorting
• Column reordering and visibility management

The first screenshot …

Next steps will be:

• Databinding support
• Horizontal scrolling
• Add new columns and cells types (date, Boolean, combobox, rating, image columns)
• And a lot of other small (or not) things!

The first version of SharpWidgetsUI has been released 2 weeks ago. It’s now time to think about the future of the toolkit.
I am planning now to add a tree grid component to the framework. This widget will be flexible enough to be used as replacement of:

• Treeview
• Listbox
• Listview
• Checklistbox
• DataGrid
• Treegrid (a Datagrid with hierarchical capabilities)

The component should have a modern and customizable look and feel.

Please tell me which features you would like to see in this grid.

Technorati key words:  Windows forms lightweight toolkit components performance Office 2007 ribbon

I am pleased to announce you the availability of SharpWidgetsUI version1.

You can download it from the page http://www.aflava.com/download.php or purchase it here: http://www.aflava.com/purchase.php .

Please, do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions.

A new widget has been added to the toolkit. Actually, this is not one but two widgets: the listbox and the verticalscrollbar.

Here is a screenshot showing the listbox in action (trendy theme):

Listbox supports the following features:

• Multi-selection
• Databinding
• Active and inactive states

The aspect of the widget is fully customisable by using renderers.

Mots clés Technorati : listbox,windows forms,toolkit

The goal of the #Widgets toolkit is to be a modern, lightweight and efficient UI toolkit. For this reason it provides the last generation of tooltips: Super tooltips.

Super tooltips bridge the gap between your user interface and your help system.

In addition of the standard caption, you can include an explanatory image and/or a description.

It allows as well to specify a footer text, generally used to inform shortcuts or the way to get more help on the feature.

Here is a tooltip drawn by the “trendy” renderer:

And with the system one:

Super tooltips can be use with widgets provided by the toolkip.

#Widgets project is becoming usable. It was time to start to have a decent website about it. Hence this week-end I’ve updated the part of the website dedicated to the project. However it is not yet finished. I will add more material soon.

Have a nice reading!

This is the first article of a series of articles focussed on widgets.

The TextField is the first really “useful” widget developed. Unfortunately this is not the easiest one. Indeed, we have to manage, painting, focus, mouse and keyboard.

The first interesting thing to notice is that TextField inherits from Container Base. That means that it is able to hold a collection of widgets. It allow for instance to create a custom TextField having buttons, like a NumericUpDown.

I am developing this library in order to have better performances but also to bypass Framework limitations.
Here is a list of interesting features:

• Full transparency

• Glow on focus

• Background image

• Help text