I want to know if is a problem for my users, me, stability, or my VB .NET program when controls like textbox, development buttons or dev tools are placed out of the form body (by extand for using tools, and reduce before publishing).
Controls are enabled = false, or hidden but necessary for my program run flow.
This is a technique that used to be common, and even today I'm not aware of anything about it that will actually break anything: winforms is perfectly happy to let you position items out of the visible area.
But it's a little unusual to see anymore, because we have better tools for managing this.
I'll add a note about remembering to call SuspsendLayout() before changing a bunch of controls to reduce flickering, and ResumeLayout() when finished.
Related
I have written an app that makes extensive use of custom right-click menus on an Access form. The code works great and the user loves it, but lately I am having trouble making it work properly.
In earlier versions of Access it worked well, but newer version seem much more limited in how many items can be put in such menus. The documentation is silent on the matter, and nobody in any newsgroup has had any useful ideas, but I regularly get random error about stack space, out of memory, and general lockups when populating the menus. Doing a C&R used to help, but now even that is not enough, and some menus I can no longer populate at all.
I tried building an app that just built menus until it crashed, to get some idea of what the limits may be, and I am well below what that indicated, but the experimental app had nothing else, while the real app has a great deal else.
Is there any information on how much stuff can be put into these menus, and what the menus share space with? There may be something I can do another way to make more room for the menus. I tried moving all code out of the form, leaving only event stubs that called routines in standard code modules, but that did not help.
And how are they stored/activated? The app is MUCH slower to load when it has these menus, even though no code is running on start-up.
********** Edited to add this:
I use VBA to create a menu, like this:
Application.CommandBars.Add "RCStat", msoBarPopup, False, False
then add it to a control. like this:
Application.CommandBars.cboStat.ShortcutMenuBar = "RCStat"
I add controls (only popups and buttons) like this:
Application.CommandBars.Controls.Add(type:=msoControlPopup)
Application.CommandBars.Controls.Add(type:=msoControlButton, Parameter:="StatKod = 77")
It runs perfectly and the menu items work exactly as expected, except that it bombs after adding some number of controls. It doesn't seem to matter where I add them, just the total number of added controls hits some undefined threshold, and the app crashes.
I got the original code from Getz, Litwin and Gilbert, 2000 edition. Back then, it worked great. But as the versions advance and the app accumulates data, it is becoming less and less functional. However, there are only around 10,000 records, and the app itself is less than 100MB - nowhere close to any of Access's upper size limits.
Pete,
I've done quite a bit of work with shortcut menus, and created the Access Shortcut Tool about 5 years ago, but have never attempted a menu with so many controls although some have 3 or 4 levels.
I am not aware of any restrictions on the number of elements in the commandbars collection, but I find that shortcut menus with too many options, like lists and combo boxes with too many items, are difficult for users to navigate. I generally break these up into segments and use buttons in the form header to display the appropriate menu. Sorry I'm unable to provide anything more helpful.
Dale
We have a commercial product, Total Access Components, that includes as one of its 30 components a right click popup menu that can include icons and font styles.
Here's the info for the popup menu control: https://fmsinc.com/MicrosoftAccess/controls/components/popup-menu/
There's a free trial if you want to try it.
Currently I would like to program an application gathering forms that are callable with buttons on the side. For this, I am using the latest build of Visual Studio Community. One way I thought of would be to literally put all the form elements (textboxes, lists, etc.) in the application window and only enable them whenever the according button is clicked on. However, if this is the way to do it, I find it quite messy and unpractical, and I'm pretty sure there's another way around.
After some research, I have learned about the MDI layouts, but they don't suit my taste. I would like to keep everything in one single frame.
Could you give me a hand?
Tab Order in Visual Studio does not work for me for some reason.
I am making a VB.NET plugin for a cad program called Rhinocreos 5.
I have everything set perfect, and I don't know what the cause of it is.
I am using .Show() instead of .ShowDialog(), because I need that thread open and I don't feel like doing any thread management (not paid enough lol)
Does anyone have any pointers for this? Has anyone else ran into a tab problem with Rhino5 and .NET?
EDIT**
Seems I have to use a MODELESS Form for a rhino plugin.... So I wont have any tab keys or arrow keys unless I do a hook. But since I need to make the plugin future proof (in case I am no longer working here), I won't be doing that either. But thanks for the answers, comments, and awesome downvotes.
Very difficult to guess what's going on from the information you have provided, but I'd check the following things in the following order:
The disobedient form is open and has focus.
The form has controls in it.
At least some of the controls are enabled, focusable have their TabStop set to true.
There is no low-level keyboard handling in action (PreviewKeyDown, hooks etc).
Finally I'd call ShowDialog() instead of Show(), passing main form as parameter (to make disobedient form a child of main form) and see if that makes a difference.
It was a modeless form inside of Rhino3D as a plugin.
Rhino3D uses all plugins in the main thread. So tab is not an option.
The workaround was to tag all controls with a tag work (I used "tabMe")
Then I store all the controls in a List myTabbyControls.
Each time I press tab, I would cycle through the list.
But thanks for the down votes. It's the running joke of SO.
Is there a reason / fix for this weird designer issue (at least, I think it's related to the designer), whereby the controls on the form do not appear as they do in the design window when I debug the application..!
Please see the following two screenshots to demonstrate the problem (note: I have blacked out some of the content of the form, this is not the problem):
Picture 1: Showing how the form appears in the designer view
Picture 2: Showing how the form appears in debug mode
You can clearly see that some of the buttons have moved position on the form.
Note: At first glance, this may appear like a duplicate of: Windows Forms Designer destroys form layout. However, I have not installed any additional tools or components. This is simply a standard "vanilla" build of Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 7 32-bit.
I've also come across this question: UI Controls Overlapping & Fonts Issue in Windows Forms Application. However, I am not using "large fonts", nor am I using any non-standard fonts on my controls (all label and button text is left as default). Still, I can see how this would affect the control positions and will do some more checks in this area.
There's nothing happening within the form's Load method.
I'm also using TFS 2012.
What could be causing this? Is there anything I can do to fix it?
EDIT: I've removed the font property for each label and button control, allowing the system to set the default value. Still no change. Interestingly, if I open the form in design mode, then save it, then close it, then open it again, the buttons have moved... If I do this a few times, the buttons migrate until they're off the form.
OK, I've found the answer, after a bit more fiddling. It seems to be related to the Anchor property on the controls. I made a bunch of changes, testing between each change to see if there was any difference. When I selected all the controls and set the Anchor property to Top, Left, this solved the issue.
I hope this helps someone else at some point!
I recently upgraded my system to Windows 7 Professional. Furthermore, I recently upgraded from VB6 to VB.NET and I've been working with forms and control under the new interface. Controls such as text boxes and tab controls are washed out and very difficult to see.
In my attempt to remedy the situation, I personalized my display by unchecking the box under "Windows Color" entitled "Enable transparency" and adjusting the Color Intensity slider all the way to the right. But no matter what I try to do, I still get washed-out form colors.
Is there a setting for adjusting the default form colors? What am I missing?
It seems to me that you have a couple of choices, all of which you probably won't like.
Change your Textbox BorderStyle from Fixed3D to FixedSingle, this will give you a more pronounced border around the textboxes (no such property on comboboxes though). This will also make your textboxes look a lot more 'flat', which you may not want.
Change either the background of your form or the background of your controls, thereby providing a better contrast between the two. Even slight variations on the same color would help.
Purchase (or make your own) custom controls that have built-in style changing abilities. I use the Telerik controls sometimes. They have the ability to let you change the UI Element's styles, including all kinds of colors and different borders and such. The issue with this option is a lot of these custom controls are overly expensive, although you can find decent ones for fairly cheap sometimes (I found a control set once that was pretty nice for $19).
Whatever you decide to do, you have to remember that your form will look different to users that are using different operating systems than what you're developing on. You noticed a big change when you went from (I'm assuming) Windows XP to Windows 7 right? You have to remember to test your application on all operating systems that your application will be expected to run on. You could design it beautifully on Windows 7 and it may look horrible on XP. You may be able to ignore OSs that are older than XP, but for the time being almost 50% of users still use XP (last I checked).
BTW, there is no setting for adjusting the default form colors... this just happens to be how forms look on Windows 7. I found it an adjustment when I went from XP to Win7, but you get used to it. I very rarely make the background of my controls the same color as the background of my form just because of this... oh, and don't go changing your display, you want to see what your users are going to see - otherwise you'll end up with something that only looks good on your computer. :)