Exploring New WinForm Controls in VS .NET Whidbey Catering to the strength of the third-party .NET component market and the power of the .NET Framework itself, Microsoft includes several powerful new WinForm controls in the Base Class Libraries for Windows application development.The WinForm controls provided by the .NET Framework 1.1 are extremely useful, and the framework for developing new custom controls provided in 1.1 is very strong, but sometimes the development community expects more out-of-the box. Many needs of the development community are satisfied by the basic collection of WinForm controls while some developers have voiced their need for more functionality. Microsoft appears ready to rise to the occasion with the inclusion of many new WinForm controls. The set of user controls that are an integral part of Microsoft's development environments provide the baseline for rapid application development (RAD). Every release of the IDE brings new controls to accelerate the development of user-friendly GUIs. Microsoft has seemed content with providing a strong set of base controls, and a framework allowing the development community and third-party Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to tackle the really heavy lifting in developing complex controls. Microsoft is starting to break with that strategy with Visual Studio .NET and really follows through with the new controls that appear in the Toolbox of the alpha build of Whidbey. The new controls include everything from data-centric, to layout-oriented containers, to significantly improved versions of existing controls. A few new controls plug up holes in the existing user control line-up. | " |
Both the ListView and TreeView classes acquire the long overdue owner-drawn capability, opening the door to highly customized variations of these two classes.
| " |
It is probable that many new or improved WinForm controls covered in this article will change, perhaps dramatically, as Whidbey progresses from alpha through beta to the final release, and new controls could surface. What you can expect for sure is that the quality, ease-of-use, and RAD characteristics of the new WinForm controls will continue to increase beyond the already impressive alpha. Simplifying Common Tasks Microsoft designed the .NET Framework to allow the developer to easily create either custom controls or extend existing controls to provide custom features. Although developers can easily create their own custom functionality, some tasks are so common that it is better to have a standard control that facilitates performing that task. Enhanced Menu Options The current MainMenu control is very useful and powerful; the in-place editing feature makes it very easy to design complex collections of menu items. One glaring omission is the left-hand image stripe that can be seen on all the menu items in the IDE, but was not available on the standard MainMenu control. The MainMenu class has been updated in Whidbey with three properties used to implement the image margin visual element: ImageList, IsImageMarginPresent, and ImageMarginColor. The new ImageList property can be set to make the desired images available for menu items, the IsImageMarginPresent property controls the visibility of the image region down the left side of any drop-down menu, and ImageMarginColor controls the color to be used for the image margin. You will often use the same set of common menu items in many applications as a part of standard Windows application design. Common menu items include the File, Edit, and Help menus. If you often use many of these common elements, you will save time by using the standardMainMenu component. The standardMainMenu component on the Toolbox creates a MainMenu control shown in Figure 1 and will auto-populate all the standard Window menu items. From this starting point, you should delete or disable the items you do no need. 
Figure 1: The standardMainMenu component generates a MainMenu control populated with the commonly used standard Windows application menu items. | & | | 
By: Michael Thomas Michael Lane Thomas, also known as the .NET Cowboy for his sometimes untamed, Wild West-style passion for .NET, has been a fixture in the development community for many years. A speaker at professional, academic, and Microsoft-internal technical conferences, Michael has been a primary contributor to 26 books, including a multi-year stint as .NET Series Editor for Wiley's/Hungry Minds, going back to the Beta days of .NET. Michael has spent time as industry analyst, commentator, and co-host of a weekly radio talk show. As an exam-junkie, Michael is currently the eighth most certified MCP in the world, passing a total of 62 exams to date. Michael is currently a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and greatly enjoys exploring the Alpha bits for Whidbey as a Microsoft VS.NET Insider, and his role of daddy to his 1-year-old son Noah, also known as "Mr. Pinchy Cheeks."
mlthomas@microsoft.com | Fast Facts | | Through the use of the ObjectForScripting and Document properties of the WebBrowser class, true two-way communication can be established between client-side script contained with a Web page and managed code executing within the process that originally requested the URL of the Web page. | |
|