Hi I've been developing little programs as hobby for the last 3 years and I was wondering if there was a possibility to use controls like in Office 2007+ (ribbon style) and in Windows 7.
I've been looking around the net but didn't found an answer that completely satisfies me. I only found commercial controls like telerik, viblend etc. But isn't there a from Microsoft native UI control pack available? What are my options besides self developing fancy ui controls?
If you use MFC (I don't), there is ribbon support: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee354408.aspx.
I believe DevExpress has ribbon controls. Not sure if they still have it but when I got my license it was for free, has been a few months. You may want to look into that.
--- Found it ---
https://www.devexpress.com/Products/Free/NetOffer/
Related
I am looking for information on an installer software for Windows applications that may support some more advanced UI styles besides the usual and dated gray/squared artifacts popular on the early Windows days. At the moment we use InstallShield for the installation of our software and contacted them for information but after over a week we still haven't heard anything. Below a picture of an installer for mac with some more up to date UI which may in line with what I am looking for.
Any help will be highly appreciated.
You can give a try to Advanced Installer (paid) tool. It offers quite a few nice and modern UI styles.
Check their Surface style here
I'm thinking of game in game user interface.
Check out XNAML:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/valentin/pages/xnaml-component.aspx
http://xnaml.codeplex.com/
[The] engine is designed to run in a
pure Xna environement on all supported
device. My engine is extensible, you
can add your own controls, inherit
from base classes (such as Control or
Pane) to make your own behavior. The
compatibility with Xaml is complete.
Create your interface on Blend and
make a simple copy/past action to add
the Xaml file in your Xna project !
Extract a C# code from a Silverlight
project and just add it to your own
Xna project !
I would definitely check out the suggestions the The ZMan has put up on this post. There are lots of UI libraries in his post.
I think you should look at this list:
I remember Crazy Eddie as a good GUI builder.
Probably a bare-bones approach (but anything XNA will be) would be the ScreenManager class as used by the Microsoft code samples. A guide to using it can be found in the Game State Management documentation.
Another possibility is XPF, an XNA-compatible library that seeks to replicate some of WPF's UI architecture. I use it myself - it's simple and elegant. It will be free for non-commercial use, with commercial pricing TBA.
(I haven't been able to load the XNAML website, but I'd guess XPF and XNAML have similar goals.)
I will start new PDA project on the windows mobile and compact framework 2.0 or higher.
I need to design the new application user interface like IPhone, it should be smilar IPhone buttons, gradiend screens, colors, some thing like this. It seems i need to many images and backgrounds on the windows mobile application for achieving this.
I don't need to use default pocketpc UI elements, it's not useful for my project and me.
I need your some suggestions about the new pocketpc app user interface design.
Could you please share me your ideas or suggestions ?
Have a look at:
http://fluid.codeplex.com/
and
http://www.beemobile4.net/
This CodeProject article will be of interest for you (iPhone UI in Windows Mobile). You may also want to look into UI Framework for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 (MSDN article describing some of the features).
I feel your pain. Worse yet, I use Win32 and C/C++ for my WM apps, which none of the listed UI libraries even support.
The end result is that unless you buy UI components from someone else for this platform, then you will unfortunately have to write your own UI controls. I had to do just that myself. :/
There is more info here.
I took a look at all these options, Fluid looks nice but the complexity of the code put me off. I've gone with a very basic approach (which fits my current needs) and I've written an ImageButton control
I'll add a vote for Resco. I been working with .NET for years but don't have any mobile or C++ experience. The Resco controls are not cheap but they made it vastly easier and cut my dev time by at least 50% and probably a lot more. In the scale of things the cost is nothing compared to developer wages and missed deadlines. No affiliation - just a happy customer :)
Also check out the Resco Toolkit
I'm looking for a way to create websites with the cool stylings of Windows Vista, like what is shown in this screenshot (taken from one of Microsoft's websites):
Any suggestions? I'd prefer an integrated designer / IDE, but libraries or templates might also help.
FYI, the answers before this were in response to a very poorly worded question. The OP did not make it clear that they were after a web page. Thanks to Shog9 for picking up the slack there.
This is NOTHING to do with WPF or VS 2008. Its a WEB application!
Lots of control vendors have produced some great looking controls, check out the ASP.NET controls gallery there is some cool stuff there. Another well-known vendor is Telerik who have created some real nice ASP.NET AJAX controls.
Note, this is not to promote their tools, I personally have not used them, they are popular, and it's just to give you the heads up.
In short, the look is pretty much fancy imagery. Unless Silverlight is used, which uses a subset of WPF and requires the plugin to be installed on the users browser, and requires VS2008 to create.
In terms of the screen shot, most of that is nice imagery, the buttons are probably rendered like that because you are running Vista, however, they could also be replicated without Vista. The page you show is not a Silverlight page, so it is not a requirement.
Have a Google for "ASP.NET vista style controls" there's tons of people after the same stuff :)
It's not a matter of what software to use - use whatever you normally use to design websites. If you want to make a web page that looks like one you see online, you can very easily obtain:
The HTML markup on the page
The CSS style sheets used by the page
The images used on the page
The Javascript used on the page (although this is less likely to be useful, as in most cases it will have been compacted and obfuscated).
Also Delphi 2009 ;-).
As mentioned Visual Studio 2008 has WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) based development tools in it. Have a look in your Project templates for WPF Application along with WPF Browser Application and WPF User Control Library. All of these pertain to Vista WPF.
The "cool Vista stylings" are done using WPF, for which you'll need Visual Studio 2008. 90-day trial downloads are here. The "Express Products" (free, stripped-down versions) are here.
Imagine you homebrew a custom gui framework that doesn't use windows handles (compact framework, so please don't argue with "whys"). One of the main disadvantages of developing such a framework is that you lose compatability with the winform designer.
So my question is to all of you who know a lot about VS customisation, would there be a clever mechanism by which one could incorperate the gui framework into the designer and get it to spit out your custom code instead of the standard windows stuff in the InitialiseComponent() method?
I recently watched a video of these guys who built a WoW AddOn designer for Visual Studio.
They overcame the task of getting their completely custom controls to render correctly in the designer. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you need, but might be worth looking at. It's open-source:
http://www.codeplex.com/WarcraftAddOnStudio
I've also since discovered that DXCore from DevExpress is a tool that simplifies plugin development. The default implementation wouldn't let me dock as document (central) but regardless one can still easily generate a plugin with it that can compile a file on the fly and render the contents of it which may well do the job for me. :)