.NET news » GUI

A base class for adding a rich asynchronous progress animation to any Form

Have you ever been faced with the task of displaying multiple pages on the same Windows Form? Most of us would certainly respond in the affirmative, and most of us have addressed this by using the good-old Tab Control. While tabs are undoubtedly a proven way of handling such cases, there are situations calling for a "less generic" approach. What if we need to make our form a bit more visually appealing and use icons or graphical buttons to flip through pages? What if we don't want to display tabs at all? Many familiar applications feature such graphical interfaces; however, the .NET framework offers no built-in tools to accomplish this, at least at the time of this writing.

One of the really great enhancements in ASP.NET was the introduction of master pages. They help developers to create a consistent layout for the pages in an application. Unfortunatly there is no such concept in WPF. But there is an easy way to build a control similar to an ASP.NET master page.

I have replicated Visual Studio's vertical TabStrip control from the ground up. This lightweight control doesn't have containers which you can dump controls onto, as I have created the control to be used with forms instead of containers. Enjoy this 173 code liner.

In this article you will see how to bind a CheckedListBox to the data source and how to get/set a list of id's for the checked items.

An article on a CheckBox ComboBox control which extends the ComboBox.Items.

Microsoft Expression Blend is a new full-featured design tool for creating highly-interactive and sophisticated Windows application user interfaces using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). With Expression Blend, a designer can design and create the UI of an application without worrying about the logic of the application. Once the UI is completed, it can be passed to the developer who will in turn code the business logic of the application.

ToolStripRenderer that renders Vista like buttons.

XForms is an important recommendation from the W3C that enables complex XML-handling applications to be defined in a simple, declarative syntax. This article demonstrates how you can leverage this power in your own applications.

An article presenting a control capable of adding a border-like effect to any desired text