I moved a few of my applications to WINDOWS 10 and one of the issue I noticed - which is not really an issue with functionality but rather the colors. Msgboxes seem to not have the top bar anymore (where TITLE goes) - it's actually there, but it's so light that it's difficult to see where the top bar is and the rest of the msg box. does anyone know how to tweak it so that it looks more defined just like it did when it was run in XP or Win7
The controls implemented from the OS. You need to change properties on the operation system. Maybe this could help:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/change-application-background-color-window-10/167b133e-62f4-4eae-9425-2b9a6019bded
Related
I am building my first "real" VB Window Forms Application (I'm a "traditional programmer") and my application has perhaps half a dozen forms.
On execution all of these forms have the Windows 10 visual style (eg: grey on white max/min/close buttons at top right)... except for 1 form, which seems to be rendering in Win XP style (eg: Blue and red button style).
I have checked that "Enable XP Visual Styles" is UNClicked in the Project Properties, but this one form stubbornly refused to change.
I have a number of my forms that also appear in "XP style" in the VS Designer, but execute fine.
I suspect I may have enabled/disabled the "XP Visual Styles" option a couple of times, and perhaps initially created some forms when this was in different states... although I have no idea if this would have been the cause.
I really want this one form to be like all the others...
any ideas please? I am using VB in VS2010 (a bit old, but what I have to hand)
As I am quite new to VB so tell me what I can provide to help..
Many thanks,
David's comment has solved my immediate issue:
The single form appearing differently is indeed using Show() whereas the others are all ShowDialog(). There is no reason for me doing this, so I have changed it.
I have an application written in vb.net which works fine in both Windows XP, Vista and 7. However, in Windows Vista and 7, the button layout (specifically the Exit/Cancel button at the bottom right) of all the forms acts weird, as the Exit/Cancel button runs all the way touching the edge/boundary of the form as shown in the pic below.
This does not happen in Windows XP. Nor does it happen on disabling the Visual Styles in Windows 7, as shown below
What can be the cause for this issue and is there any way to solve this, so that it looks good for both XP and Windows 7?
EDIT: I'm posting this on behalf of a friend - Abhijit (https://stackoverflow.com/users/2642426/abhijit-hota) - who wanted to post this himself but had less than 10 reputation. Apparantly you need to have at least 10 reputation to post a question with an image.
One way to fix it is the place the buttons in a TableLayoutPanel. Then you can
Move it a bit further from the edge
Or leave an extra column on the right as a margin or gutter
Or anchor it in a way (left maybe) to prevent it
Another possible cause is that the controls are not using the Anchor property and he has tried to neatly line them up with something as an absolute position (which Visual Stlyes messes up as relative sizes and text extent changes). Any given user may or may not be using Styles Anchors so a layout panel works well to neaten things up.
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. :)
I have an application (chat) that I am developing for our company (special requirements). We are mostly using WinXP computers. I want it to be topmost and docked to the right, the problem is, I don't want it to overlap other windows that people are working on.
Is there a way to change the default area that other programs can maximize to? Basically, I want it to look something like this:
Is something like this possible? I'm using VB.net so all .net answers are accepted.
Thanks!
Take a look at the following codeproject article:
Application Desktop Toolbars
It seems to do what you require.
This article is about Application Desktop Toolbars, which are
applications that can align to the screen much like the taskbar. The
article will develop a base class for developing such apps.
I have a Windows Phone 7 application and I regularly see "weird" UI glitches that take me AGES to debug. It's a range of issues like controls appearing to have extra margin, scrollbars not appearing, animations looking really glitchy, entire page scrolled down, combobox items offset, etc. etc.
I'm happy to admit it might be me - but how to you debug UI errors like this? I know there's Silverlight Spy for the PC Silverlight Apps. Is there anything like this for Windows Phone 7?
Any debugging tips v much appreciated.
I have found that it is a good idea to start with Windows Phone 7 Design Templates, adopt a version control system right from day one of the project and to edit the XAML, use Expression Blend. The Visual Studio is great for writing code, but, to harness the real power of the tools, Expression Blend is the best to style your application.
HTH,
indyfromoz
Here are some tips:
Many people have issues with the emulator due to their graphics card.
Things like slow animations and ui glitches are very common.
Check that your graphics card is Direct X 10.1 at least and that your Driver
Model is WDDM 1.1
Make sure you have the latest drivers.
Windows 7 has less issues with the emulator than Vista
Make sure you have the latest tools, get the RTM release from the website.
In the RTM release, the frame rate counters are displayed by default in a vertical bar on the left, you should monitor these to check for performance issues
Here are a couple of things which I normally do... none of them are real smart, but sharing nevertheless.
Deploy it after every 2-3 controls that you add and ensure things are correctly laying out.
If by chance it doesn't work the way I am expecting it to, I have a parallel Silverlight 3 project running in which I typically paste the XAML and see if it works fine.
After that, I typically check it out as a Silverlight project since even I am not sure of any tools available for Win Phone 7.
I have favorited this question and I hope someone points us to something more interesting.
There's a lot you can checkout with Blend as Indy suggests. This is really good advice.
Regarding some of your specific issues these aren't necessarily glitches. I'll comment on a couple that stand out.
Extra margin - this and padding are built into the metro controls by design. Again, in blend you can dig into this by retemplating the control and changing properties of objects within the control.
The procedure for this is rclick the control, edit template, edit a copy. Then you can look at the different states and objects and change things as suits. While doing this please keep in mind the App Certification Requirements and UI Design Guidelines.
Regarding scrollbars, these are by design hidden until you start scrolling. You can control their availability with Horizontal/VerticalScrollBarVisibility on relevant controls (or on the ScrollViewer embedded in some controls - again retemplate in blend).
Combobox isn't metro themed so is going to struggle in the fitting in department, but there are posts around where people have done work on this. ListPicker is a better fit imo from the Windows Phone Toolkit released with the RTM tools.
If you can't see any obvious causes for the glitches in your code the first thing I would recommend is to actually test your app on a real device. Somethings - particularly animated objects -don't always look exactly the same when you run them on a device.
I thought I had a animation glitch in one of my apps but it only appears in the emulator. When I run on an actual device I don't see it.
Of course this doesn't help you if you can't get a phone to test it on yet, but before you potentially waste hours trying to debug a problem you might not have I would work on the rest of the app until such time as you can test the app on a real phone.
The same goes for anyone creating animations - don't waste time perfecting animations in the emulator. The timings will almost certainly be different on the actual device, so wait till you have one to test on.