The .Net platform is offering 2 technologies for desktop applications.

The first one, Windows Forms exists since the first version of the .Net Framework. It has been upgraded with the version 2 of the framework. It is still an excellent choice for desktop applications (a lot of controls are available and it is possible to create a good user experience with them).

With the third version of the framework, appeared WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). WPF is a huge change. It brings a lot of new interesting concepts: vector rendering of the UI, the ability to mix all kind of media in an application, …

However it makes heavy applications and some things are difficult to achieve (just try to have a DataGrid with acceptable performances in WPF for instance).

During last PDC, Microsoft announced: “The ability to run Silverlight in and out of the browser”.

Silverlight is a subset of the framework, targeting Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Silverlight is more lightweight than WPF and its big advantage is the size of the framework for deployment.

Even if there is no forecasted date for a release, I am starting to be impatient to test it in order to see how it can compete with Windows Forms and WPF for Desktop applications.

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:

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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.

Actually this is not the real first widget. The panel has been created before but it is not really “visual”. Hence I preferred to talk about it later and to start with the label.

I started with it because it is one of the easiest widget to develop.

A picture is worth a thousand words so here are some screenshots:

In design mode:

When running:

Like the common windows forms label, the widget label has a text and an image property plus a full set of properties to customize its appearance.

Mots clés Technorati : label,widget,lightweight toolkit