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.)
Related
I want to print the current UI of a Xamarin.Forms cross-platform application. Are there any plugins or libraries available which support both android ios and uwp projects to do this? I'd really appreciate being pointed in the right direction to get started on implementing this kind of feature in my application.
I would approach this in two steps. Firstly you need to convert the current visuals into a printable file type. So assuming we are working with primarily mobile devices then we should make use of the 'screenshot' mechanisms.
There is a very good answer to another stack overflow account HERE that guides you through setting up screenshots in xamarin forms using dependancy injection. The chaps answer is straight forward and easy to follow.
Once you have that screenshot as a png or jpeg etc. It's time to print it. There are a lot of threads on xamarins developer forums dedicated to the issues around printing from xamarin, a collection of these can be found HERE.
So to start with it's worth mentioning that every platform xamarin forms (XF)supports has it's own mechanism for printing. XF does not provide any abstractions for printing in a cross-platform manner. You will need to write printing logic for each layer and expose it to XF using DependencyServices.
Android Printing - this is a link to printing in android.
iOS Printing - this is a link to printing in iOS (Heres a sample app to help you as well.)
As I previously mentioned, because xamarin hasn't created a simple cross-platform mechanism for this in Forms, it's not quite as simple as you'd think and does require some work to implement. But none of the work is overly complicated, it uses standard dependancy patterns, it's really just the bulk of code required that can seem a bit daunting.
I have to develop an application for Windows Mobile 6.x and version 7 and my skillset is .net and web based. Since version 7 is not backwards compatible I am thinking that I will end up with a lot of duplicate work.
I had a look at Rhomobile and Phonegap but the later does not support windows mobile 6.x and the former would require ruby knowledge.
I thought that I could have as much logic in class libraries as possible and then "include as link" the classes into projects so that they can be compiled for the specific platform. I feel like I may end up with a lot of #if PHONE7 style logic in that case and also the user interface code would have to be implemented for each platform.
What is the most efficient way to solve this problem?
If you can separate the UI from the logic you can begin to multi-target. The other consideration is the runtime of the phone (Silverlight 4?) and the phone sandboxing giving you limitations.
MVVM Light is multi-targeted and is open source, you could use this to review how they tackled it:
http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/d546dc69fffd
In short though, your "add as link" idea is pretty much the basis of it.
The other question to ask is will the application fit on both platforms? The usage style from mobile to metro is a big change. People expect things to behave a certain way and look a certain way on metro. If you can confine this to the UI and move as much logic out as possible, then you should be ok. But there will come a point where it isn't worth sharing, it is simply easier to duplicate.
Sorry for a lack of detail in this answer, to be honest it is heavily app specific. I would personally start with separate applications and refactor as commonalities appear, using a combination of linked code files and hash defines.
A cute trick... you can always make the classes partial and have a partial code file for each hash define:
MyBusinessClass.CF.cs
MyBusinessClass.Silverlight.cs
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
Can anyone recommend a GUI builder tool for creating DHTML web apps using AJAX to communicate with a web service backend? I'd like to avoid having to mess around with designing HTML, marshalling/unmarshalling data, checking for browser compatibility, etc. The tool should have a library of widgets that can be put into an application and hooked up to functionality, and be extensible enough to be able to define custom widgets. Of course free and/or open source is preferrable but I would consider proprietary tools too.
Also to what extent does the choice of GUI tool affect what platform or language I would use for the backend? If the GUI is just calling a web service then I should be able to use anything on the server-side to provide that interface but maybe some gui-side tools use a proprietary data exchange format that requires some specific server-side code?
Edit: I don't need a widget that can be dragged, I want an IDE that allows one to build a gui easily (i.e. a RAD tool).
WaveMaker is open source, runs on J2EE.
If you're comfortable with Java, maybe you could try Google Web Toolkit? http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
I'm using Wavemaker and it does exactly what are u asking...
It is really easy to use and very perfomant....
I believe Dreamweaver does some of this, but in my opinion such editors are not a good idea. They produce horrible, unmaintainable server-side code and are quite inflexible.
Wavemaker beats everything else I have used hands down. Applications can be developed rapidly, has drag and drop, can connect to any web service, and has unmatched database management tools. The only problem with it is that it has kept changing hands/ownership so much and its future direction is not clear.
Delphi for PHP from Codegear has some of this capability, but I would agree with ceejayoz that such tools don't necessarily make for nice code.
On Dan's suggestion I took a look at GWT. I'd heard of it before but never looked at it that closely and it seems pretty interesting. Certainly it takes away the annoyance of pixel pushing and making things work in multiple browsers. I also tried searching for "gwt rad tools" and came up with a couple of results:
Instantiations GWT Designer (commercial, $59/year)
Wirelexsoft Vistafei (still in beta but will have a free and a commercial version)
I'll take a look at these but if anyone's used something else let me know.
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. :)