What is more lightweight control, a label, or a picturebox? (label can contain image too).
I will have a form with 110 icons displayed in separate controls and I'm deciding if I should display them in pictureboxes, or a labels.
In VB6, there was an Imagebox control which was MUCH more lightweight than picturebox. What is the most similar control to Imagebox in VB.NET?
Thanks! :-)
Although I know it's not part of your question, the real problem it seems you are experiencing is the fact that you have 110 icons in a single form. I would take a look at the UI and see if there is a better way to lay it out or design it so you don't have to worry about whether or not to use one component vs the other.
I don't think you can compare them because fundamentally they are so different--VB6 controls versus .net framework controls that is.
Take a look at the class hierarchy in .net and you will see that both picturebox and label derive from the same set of classes.
While I didn't itemize the classes' properties and methods, I would guess that the only difference between a Label and a Picturebox is that there is a text property for a Label box thus alleviating you of rendering your own text if there were no Label control and all you had was a PictureBox.
Both a Label and a PictureBox can be assigned an Image object or work in conjunction with an ImageList. So if all you are looking to do is display images then the PictureBox should be just fine (not to mention the fact that it clearly conveys the control's purpose in life: PictureBox:Icons::Label:Text).
Related
I created a winform application. The size of each screen is 1361, 768 in pixels. This worked great for larger screens and/or laptops. But now I have to move my application to 10inch screen tablets, which means my application does not fit.
I have never had to deal with this issue before, how can auto adjust each form size and adjust all of the controls and panels when viewing on smaller screens?
I am using VS 2012.
Making forms fully scalable in WinForms is possible, but it takes a bit of work. The good news is that most of this work is done at design-time, arranging the controls properly so that everything is done for you automatically by the framework. It's drudgery, but it isn't difficult. Rejoice that you don't have to write the scaling code by hand, form-by-form, like you did with VB 6.
There are four fundamental properties that you will need to acquaint yourself with:
Anchor
Dock
Margin
Padding
The last two should be quite familiar web developers who know CSS—they do the same thing here. Padding controls the inner margin around a control, while margin controls the outer margin. You will need to set these correctly to ensure that your controls can "breathe", because the automatic scaling code is just going to jam them up against one another.
The "standard" margins around a control in a Windows desktop application are approximately 12–15 pixels. You should make sure that you leave at least this much room. Then add additional margins/padding as you see fit to separate things. I keep these layout specifications bookmarked for reference. This is another good reference.
The next step is to instruct the layout manager how you want the controls to be arranged and resized. The key to this is to think in terms of container controls and child controls. The form itself is a container control, and you can set its child controls to either Anchor or Dock within its boundaries. One or more of those child controls can itself be a container control, and its child controls can be Anchored or Docked within its borders. The nesting is virtually unlimited, but for your own sanity and reasonable redraw performance, you'll want to keep it to a reasonable minimum.
A good way of doing this is to use the two provided invisible layout helpers, FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel. Personally, I don't find the former very useful very often, at least not for standard Windows applications. But the TableLayoutPanel is invaluable.
Generally what I will do is fill my entire form with a TableLayoutPanel (margins = 0, dock = fill). Then I will add individual controls (or sometimes another nested TableLayoutPanel) to its cells. Those child controls will have their margins set appropriately, and will have either their Anchor or Dock properties set, depending on whether I want that control to have a fixed size or resize dynamically.
Before you get the hang of how these properties interact and how it all works, you'll probably need to play around with your layout a bit. Make a backup of your forms and then just dig in. Or, you might find it easier to start designing each form from scratch (you can still copy-and-paste individual controls in order to preserve their other properties). Eventually, it will all start making sense to you, and you'll be up and going in a jiffy.
The great thing is, once this is all set up, all you have to do is ensure that your form is resizable. Then, whether the user manually resizes it or uses the maximize/restore button, it'll automatically fill their screen size. This also works well for all DPI settings, which is another common Achilles' heel of WinForms devs.
Try to get the resolutions variables to adjust your screens, there is an answer to get these variables using the Screen class
Getting Screen Resolution
DevExpress has a great control call the Layout Control. This control helps to maintain consistent whitespace between controls as the form is resized. It does take a little study to use the control effectively but once you understand how to use this control the results are consistent and you are able to speed through form design.
Wondering if someone could help me....
I have a small .NET application where I have an Edit button on a main form. When the user clicks the Edit button, I want to popup a small form right next to it (on top of the main form) with a speech balloon tail attached on the side of the form pointing to the Edit button. So it gives the effect of a floating form pushed out from the Edit button.
I don't want the appearance of a normal speech bubble, I want it to look like an actual borderless form (with square corners). It could be a custom control or anything (however, I am not yet familiar with creating my own custom controls), but I need to add Text Controls, Pictures, Label Controls, etc. to this floating form.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
UPDATE
I am trying to create something to this affect:
So imagine the ? being the Edit button and the other being a form with custom controls.
Like this?
To get this behavior:
Select an image which will represent your speech bubble. Put a PictureBox on the form, make it use this image. Place two labels, as above, adjust the font.
Pick your transparency key (color). Your image background and form background need to be set to that. I used black for demo purposes, which is a bad choice if you plan to have any black or text in your speech bubble. Set form's TransparencyKey property to this color in designer. More about TransparencyKey on MSDN.
(final step, not shown on the screenshot). Set FormBorderStyle = None.
Also make sure you have other ways to close your bubble, because X will be unavailable.
The final result may look something like the following:
Note: You may notice some drawing artifacts, most images on the internet have smooth borders, and transparency key does not support shades, has to be exact color. If you are fine with these minor artifacts, feel free to leave it at that. Or, edit it to get rough borders. Or find another one that better suits your needs.
I'm trying to keep transparency of buttons and labels which are inside of a panel control.
I set the BackColor properties to Transparent, but it doesn't work.
Also I tried
Me.SetStyle(ControlStyles.SupportsTransparentBackColor, True)
Me.Panel1.BackColor = Color.Transparent
but it doesn't seem to work.
The screenshot below is our design plan. We try to set an image below the panel, buttons and Menu Strip. Can you tell me please if this is possible, and if so, how to?
http://www.gomidjets.com/images/upper.png
With regards to custom designing your Form in WinForms, it isn't supported very well. Only some of the controls support transparency, and it really impacts on performance. If you are avid that it must be transparent, make sure that your Form has its TransparencyKey set to a value, and then change each of the Panels, Buttons, Labels and MenuStrips background to this color (Usually some obtuse color).
If your program is in its early stages, I strongly suggest that you give WPF some serious consideration. From the level of customization to your Form you are doing, you would be much better doing WPF. I myself have just moved over, and this is a screeny of my first project in WPF (And I've learnt this all from StackOverflow, so you should pick it up pretty fast!)
As you can see, literally everything on that form has been customised, and every single control supports full Transparency!
Sometimes, I have a picturebox lets say 100x100. But the image it will display is actually 100x400.
I don't want to increase the size of the picturebox itself. Instead, I would like to create a vertical scrollbar (or horizontal if needed).
I could not find a scrollbar in the toolbox, so I guess I have to code it. But, how?
And I still wonder if I didn't make a mistake and didn't see the scrollbar in the toolbox. My apologies then :(
I suppose you could add separate scrollbar controls and sync their Scroll events up with the offset at which the picture in the PictureBox is drawn, but that sounds like actual work. There's a better way.
Add a Panel control to your form, and set its AutoScroll property to "True". This will cause the control to automatically show scrollbars when it contains content that lies outside of its currently visible bounds. The .NET Framework will take care of everything for you under the covers, without you having to write a single line of code.
Drag and drop your PictureBox control inside of the Panel control that you just added. The Panel control will then detect that one of its child controls is larger than its visible area and show scrollbars, thanks to the AutoScroll property. When the user moves the scrollbars, the portion of the image in your PictureBox that is visible will be automatically adjusted. Magic.
(The reason you have to use a Panel control as a container is because PictureBox does not inherit directly from the ScrollableControl base class, which is what provides the AutoScroll property.)
I tried this and it worked well. But I noted that if the picturebox is docked in the panel, the picturebox is automatically set to the size of the parent panel, and can't be set larger (at least not in any way I could find). This defeats the purpose of the technique. So -- put the picturebox on the panel, but don't dock it, and it will work perfectly.
There are no automatic scroll bars on a picture box, but you can add the VScrollBar (and HScrollBar) control to the form and handle the image scrolling manually by redrawing it at a different offset each time the Scroll event is fired.
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.