In VB6 I have been using pictureboxes as containers a lot.
For example I put 5 pictureboxes onto a form, and as soon as the user clicked the "Next" button, I brought the next picturebox into the foreground.
This has been extremely convenient.
Now I am fighting with doing something similar in VB.NET.
My attempts were not really successful. A picturebox does not really hold my controls, they seem to jump out now and then, and I can not really make out on which picturebox a control is currently located since the picturebox is not opaque as in VB6.
Can somebody please tell me how to do this in a good way in VB.NET?
This sounds like a job for the Panel control
For your issues with panels that you posted a screenshot for. Your panel is within another container, that's why it's displaying strangely. Try clicking the panel and cutting it (ctrl-x) then clicking the form header, and pasting it (ctrl-p). That will ensure it isn't within another control as sometimes that can happen in a way that isn't exactly obvious (like how you can see the control borders in your screenshot).
Related
I just have it in my mind. And I can't explain it so here it goes.
A system that only uses 1 form?
It have a two panel, left and right.
The left is consist of buttons
Then the right is associated on the buttons and will change whether what button will be clicked.
Any ideas?
My preference is to do this via custom controls, rather than panels... but panels can work too.
There are a number of ways to do this:
Keep all of the controls layered on top of each other, and then set the Visible property to false for controls/panels you don't care about and to true for the Control/Panel that you do
Move the controls you don't care about out of the visible area
Remove/Add the Controls/Panels from Form's controls collection entirely
I think you can also get a TabControl to put the tabs along the left side, with some formatting that looks more like buttons, such that what you want will be handled without needing to write any code to switch layouts
Any of those can work. Whichever option you use, I have two recommendation for controlling layout and making the transitions smooth.
Call SuspendLayout() before making any changes, and then call ResumeLayout() when you're done. This will help avoid stuttering or a partially rendered form.
Look at the TableLayoutPanel Control. This control will allow you to arrange your top-level panels so that they can be resized with proportion. If you also then dock your individual panels, you can quickly build your program so that it resizes correctly.
You can have several panels, one on top of another. Change their visibility, depending on which one you need at a given moment.
Option #2 would be using a vertical tab control (or a tab strip - see another answer there).
I am designing a VBA UserForm (in Excel, if it is relevant) and I would like some controls to be visually grouped together.. but when I put them in a frame, I am getting some undesired results (part of it has to do with the RefEdit control which seems to be particularly unhappy inside a frame).
Is there a way to draw a border around a group of controls on a form without putting them inside a Frame?
Use a label with the caption deleted and the border style set to fmBorderStyleSingle. It may appear on top of your other controls, so right click on it and select "send backwards" until it's behind your other controls.
The best way to do this would be to create the shape over where you need it to be. Drag highlight everything that you want on top of it, then right click and brink it all forwards. Then when you drag your shape back over the top it will in fact be underneath everthing else.
Hope that helps.
This worked for me and I was at first having the same issue where I had to choose to "Send Backward" up to 30 times per label in some cases. I found that hitting the Ctrl-K sends it to the back of all controls with one time hitting these keys.
Very weird situation going on with a FlowLayoutPanel...
I have been dynamically adding user controls to my panel. This user control has a height of 105. If I have my FlowLayoutPanelwidth to only show 1 "column" of controls, it will only display 296 of them. The rest of the controls are grayed out at the bottom of the flowlayoutpanel. If I widen the flp to allow 2 "columns" of controls, I can see 592 of them, with the remainder grayed out at the bottom. I have gone in and resized the user control to make it shorter in height, which works in some respects (i.e. it works when I have two columns, but not just 1), and can go forward with this work-around.
So, I guess my question is, why does the FlowLayoutPanel behave in this fashion? It seems (based on what I saw) that there is a limit to how much data the FLP will show at one time.
Your comment just reminded me that when you're adding many controls to any container it is a good idea to do this:
YourPanel.SuspendLayout();
// populate panel with controls
YourPanel.ResumeLayout(false);
This in effect stops the container (panel) from re-rendering itself every time you add a control until you're done adding controls. In the very least your panel creation will be smoother and faster. Not sure if this might fix your issue or avoid the need for a hack with PerformLayout.
If you look at your Form's designer file you will actually see this in action in the InitializeComponent function.
i am using vb.net
i just wanna ask if we can place a picture in a picture box in different places...
for example, we place a picture in the center of a picture box then we place another picture on the left side of the picture box. is it possible??
and also can we use one picture box that can contain more pictures or images on it???
to make it clear, it is a drag and drop senario, first you have to drag a picture from a toolbar for example, then you are to drop it on the picutre box, the problem is, we have to drop more than one picture in the picturebox, so is it really possible?
To my knowledge, this is not possible with the standard .NET picturebox control.
You could, however, create a custom control that would encompass this functionality.
I'm thinking it wouldn't be too complicated to do.
But probably the best way to handle it would be to create your picture box controls programmatically.
EDIT: Found something that might be useful for you, on CodeProject. Its a extended picturebox control, that seems to have multiple pictures in it.
Extended Picturebox
You will need to build all this functionality from scratch no matter which control you're using. You can use Picturebox, Button, Panel and so on, and they'll all provide the same fundemental for building the required functionality. I would suggest that you used a panel/canvas though. And as Jon suggested, subclassing a panel to create a custom control would properably be the best idea.
Inside this custom control, you will need to keep track of which images that have been dragged into the control, which images is affected by several mouse actions such as click, hover and release, and you will need to draw the pictures manually.
In VisualBasic.Net When I activate a picture box and then draw something on it, it draws and then immediately goes blank. Works fine when I re-draw it, but almost always messes up the first time I draw on it. This has happenned with several different programs, and the help file is no help.
Try setting the DoubleBuffered property
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.doublebuffered.aspx
If that's not it, please provide more info.
Usually, if you're drawing something on a picture box or on another control, you have to take over the OnPaint event, and you're responsible of persisting what you draw on this event.
Thank you Andrew, but no help. I'm using .Net Framework 1.1, which does not offer the DoubleBuffered property... it was new in 2.0.
Not sure what additional info to provide.. the code is 300 lines long. When a button is clicked, the code expands my form, makes two picture boxes visible (one on top of the other (the back one is for some graph labels), and then uses some graphic brushes and pens to draw a graph on the front box. There's some database activity and calculations going on in the background at the same time.
I assume you're using the standard PictureBox component. Do you draw in the Paint-Handler? If not then the PictureBox will just erase your painted stuff next time it's asked to redraw itself (erase background etc.).
Yes, I believe I am using the standard picture box.
By Paint-Handler, I assume you mean a [Control].PaintEvent Handler. No I'm not using an event handler to do the drawing... drawing my chart is not an event in itself, but part of a much larger response to a button click event.
If you are saying that having the drawing code be part of a separate and specific handler can solve my problem, than I guess I could raise an internal event every time I want to redraw the chart. But I Would rather just figure out what is causing the PB to redraw itself without being told to.
If you cannot use the DoubleBuffered than you can HIDE a second picture box. You do the drawing in it and once it's completed you draw back to the VISIBLE one. This way the process of drawing is done on the hidden one and the white/flickering will not be shown.