If you open settings of wifi and choose any network you will see Password textbox and BUTTONS (not icons) in ApplicationBar. How it is made? Is it some kind of ApplicationBar template? Or it is some Border control, but how to show a Border above the SIP(keyboard)?
Any ideas how to make the same thing?
What are you describing was not created using Silverlight (all the "hero" applications are done in C++) and are therefore not limited by the current SL feature set.
In relation to your actual question, it is not possible to template the ApplicationBar nor is it even possible to determine when the SIP is displayed (or what its height is).
In short, I'd stick to icons if you want your application to work well across devices.
Related
On Windows Phone 7, go to Settings, email & accounts, add an account, the Windows Live (or any other). Note at the bottom there is the gray panel with a rectangular [sign in] button. Click in the email address field, and the on screen keyboard pops up ABOVE the gray panel. Rotate the phone, and the gray panel does not rotate, although the page does. That gray panel is the Application Bar, is it not?
I only find docs for adding an icon-based round button (and menu items). How do we put a rectangular textual button on the Application Bar?
Adding buttons in the Application Bar is not supported for third party developers. The Application Bar itself is not a Silverlight control; it's a native one. Only OEMs, certain partners and MS have access to the native SDK, so you won't be able to template the Application Bar to have buttons. Of course, you could create your own Application Bar that mimics the real one, but I don't recommend that approach as it would be very tricky to get it exactly right and be consistent between apps.
Yes, that's the application bar. Well, it's the non Silverlight version of it. (The built in apps are not built with Silverlight.)
Unfortuanately it is not possible to use text buttons on the application bar. It's only possible to use buttons with images.
Yes it would be nice/useful in a number of situations but it's just not possible with the current SDK (even Mango). I keep hoping it'll be there in a future version...
The applications that come with the phone are not restricted to using developer APIs and the one you mention likely uses C++ and / or restricted APIs. As a third-party developer your only option is to stick with icons on the application bar.
You can always create a Panel colored like the application bar, aligned along the bottom of the screen and display buttons or whatever other UI element you want to.
I have read the UI Design Guidelines for WP7 development and am actually a fan of Metro (to a point). However, an app I am developing is requiring custom theming regardless of the user's theme settings.
In general, I just manually set each element that I want to be sure uses a specific color (rather than a theme resource). But I can't seem to find settings regarding the system tray (status bar).
I am okay with it showing as long as I can change it's color (failing that though, how can I hide it?). The color I need it to always be is black. Obviously when the dark theme is selected, we are good to go. But it looks terrible in the light theme to have a big white bar at the top of the app.
Hopefully this is an easy question with some easy to earn rep!
It is possible to change that color in mango. SystemTray.BackgroundColor = Colors.Orange; In my case it must be inserted in OnNavidatedTo, in constructor it disappeared after 1 second.
If you want to set this in the xaml you can do something like this:
shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"
shell:SystemTray.Opacity="0"
shell:SystemTray.ForegroundColor="Black"
I am not aware of a way to change the theme of the system tray (or status bar). You can hide it using the SystemTray.IsVisible property.
Note that I've had trouble trying to set that property within the page constructor (I think it fails when resuming after tombstoning, don't remember exactly). The solution was to place the code in the page's Loaded or OnNavigatedTo event.
Whats the best way to create a 'scrollable panel' in MFC (C++) ? In the past I have displayed different windows "attached" or "on top" of my main dialog window as a means of display different pages of an application. What I want to do this time is create a panel of controls that can be scrolled (because the virtual size of the panel is bigger than the size of the panel itself).
Can anybody recommend any good articles or tutorials on how best to do this?
Thanks
You can create an independent scrollbar control on the side of your dialog. Respond to the messages in the dialog to move your controls. Since the child windows will crop themselves to the parent client area, feel free to move them completely off the dialog as they scroll off the page.
If you place the controls in a CScrollView or a CFormView they will be automatically scrollable inside the view area.
I have a custom control: it's managed code, which subclasses System.Windows.Forms.Control.
I want to add things like edit boxes, selection lists, combo boxes, radio buttons and so on to places on this control. An easy way to do this is to simply add instances of these classes to the Controls collection, so that they become child controls.
Adding them as child controls might create some subtle problems, for example:
IE 6 select controls(Combo Box) over menu
I have scrollbars on my control which appear to scroll the contents of the control (the contents are bigger than the control itself); when a child control is near the edge of the screen then I'd like to half-display (i.e. clip) that child (i.e. to have half of it located off the edge of the physical screen), but a true child control cannot be located outside the border of its parent.
Are there other potential problems?
When I use IE7 to display http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/htmlselect.php (for example), which contains combo boxes etc., and when I then use Spy++ to spy on IE7 when I'm doing that, I see only a single Window/control instance with no children (whose class name is "Internet Explorer_Server").
I'm guessing this means that in IE7, the functionality to render a combo box is built in to the IE7 control itself, and that IE7 does not use standard controls as child controls.
Questions:
Is it better to reuse standard controls as children of a custom control, or, to reimplement the functionality of standard controls within a custom control itself?
Do you have any caveats (warnings) to share, related to either scenario?
If I wanted to reimplement the functionality of standard controls within a custom control, do you know of any existing code (which implements this functionality) that I could re-use?
If such code already exists, I don't know how to search for it (my searches find, for example, owner-draw combo boxes, and extensions to standard combo boxes): perhaps few people reimplement the standard controls from scratch?
Edit
I found a semi-related question: How to render a control to look like ComboBox with Visual Styles enabled?
Yes, Internet Explorer draws the controls using the Windows theming APIs. You can do this too using the types defined in the System.Windows.Forms.VisualStyles namespace.
The IE team did this to avoid performance problems of having so many controls, each receiving window messages, on screen at once. For example, looking at this StackOverflow.com page, I see 30-40 link label controls, 10 buttons or so, 20+ labels, etc.
It should be noted the Zune software, which is .NET managed code, also uses custom controls; if you try to use Spy++ on any of the controls, you'll see they aren't real Win32 controls. You may use Reflector on the Zune software to see exactly what they're doing. If I recall right, they're using a custom managed UI framework that's included in the Zune software.
As far as rewriting these controls from scratch, I think there's a ton of work to be done. It sounds easier than it really would be.
When laying out a WinForm in Visual Studio you get the ability to resize and align your controls very easily with drag handles and border alignment hints.
I'd like to do the same with a runtime control to enable the user to position an image on a page.
For example, if the user has a photo and they want to place it as a background on the desktop I'd like the control to help them move and size the photo thumbnail in a mini desktop visual.
I can do all of this, but my real question is, does anyone know of a way to inherit from the standard WinForms layout editor so that I can choose to use the nice docking, alignment hints and control resizing without coding it all again?
Thanks in advance
Ryan
I don't know about easy, but you can host the actual winforms designer in your own applications without too many problems.. See here.