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Windows has long had the ability to specify a region or transparency key allowing you to define an arbitrary Window border. This is often used with a background image to define an image outline as a Window frame. However, this border is composited with the desktop as a one bit mask giving you a pixelated boundary. It is especially unattractive with curvilinear borders which really need antialiasing and per pixel compositing. Aside from the unsightliness, it's not easy to define the region and/or transparency key to achieve a complex image based Window frame.

This is a Windows Forms control that works with Win32 APIs and without WPF. The control allows you to layout a 32 bit image with an alpha channel in the Forms designer and arrange additional controls within user specified areas of the image. At runtime, the control will generate a per pixel alpha composited Form with the desktop. The Form's Region property defines areas of the Form to host other controls, and it's calculated on the fly from the image's alpha channel. This control also supports runtime changing of the image. Before we discuss some of the code specifics, let's run through how you use it.

I am developing a 4X Space Opera game called Star Odyssey, in the tradition of the Master of Orion series. Every game needs a User Interface and mine is no exception. The DirectX SDK provides a sample UI that looks very cool, but it is very difficult to extrapolate from the project and it relies on textured GUI elements. Since I am not very good at drawing GUI elements, it would have taken ages for me to go that way. Instead, I took the ''programmer art'' way: to create controls and other GUI elements in a dynamic way, trying my best to make it look cool at the same time. The result is presented here.

This article demonstrates a complex analog-style thermometer control in C#. The control is in pure managed code. Most visual elements can be adjusted through the control's properties.

This control can be easily configured to allow input of any value that is a collection of numeric fields, such as an IP address, IP address with ports, IPv6 address, MAC address, telephone number or social security number.

I worked on a project in which I needed a graph control. Later on, I was also required to use a chart control. So I thought, hey, let's just combine them both into one nice and simple control..

You can find text scrollers in many programs, especially in their "About" dialogs. In most cases, it's a simple colored text which moves up. In this article, I attempted to create something unusual. I decided to write an "outgoing" text component, which looks like a 3D effect (like in the intro to the Star Wars movies).

GDI+ provides many "easy to use" objects and functions. Using these functions, you can do something special without much trouble. Before writing this component with the help of GDI+, I tried to create it with GDI. This required much more time and resulted in ten times more code. It seems to be a hard task, but later I recreated this same component in GDI+. That was easy. After that, I decided to write this article to demonstrate some features of GDI+..

VwdCms.SplitterBar is a server control that allows you to easily add resizing to your web page layout. This version of the control is designed to work in a 2 column layout.

Fast ComboBox that correctly displays all logical drives with appropriate icon, volumename and drive letter

This is simple yet powerful wizard framework for .Net 2.0. Just drag and drop and your component is ready for use.

Vista Controls is a class library that provides the ability to use the new style controls on Microsoft Windows Vista.

.NET 2.0 applications that use the Treeview, Listview, OpenFileDialog, SaveFileDialog and FolderBrowserDialog classes provided in the System.Windows.Forms assembly will find that when they run on Windows Vista, they do not use the new, Vista-style look and feel, but instead continue to use the old, XP-style look and feel.

In Vista Controls you will find five replacement classes, that will use the Vista look and feel when running on Windows Vista, and the old style on older versions of Windows. This allows you to target both Windows Vista and other versions of Windows without any additional effort on your part.

Additionally, Vista Controls includes a new control added to Vista, the Command Link. Because this control doesn't exist in previous versions of Windows, an emulated version that mimics Vista look and feel is used on those Windows versions.