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How to create a panel with a transparent drop shadow in C# using GDI+

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.

Visual Studio comes with a huge number of pre-built components and controls, including controls for entering and displaying text, letting the user pick options and make choices, displaying values graphically, interacting with databases, displaying dialogs, and containing and arranging other controls. But it comes with surprisingly few controls for displaying graphical data. If you don't want to shell out big bucks for a third-party graphing control, you're pretty much stuck drawing your own pictures on a PictureBox.

Fortunately, drawing graphs isn't all that hard. Mostly it's a matter of drawing lines or boxes to connect some data points. The only really tricky details involve translating data values to and from the pixel coordinate system used to draw on the control..

Learn how to use .NET transformations to make rotating, stretching, and moving objects simple--even for complex objects such as paths and text.

At a minimum, a Mobile PC application is expected to efficiently manage the power needs, communication environment, inking and form factor constraints of the platforms it supports. This article shows how to easily incorporate ink awareness, power awareness, power awareness and size awareness into otherwise Mobile PC agnostic Windows Form applications, bringing then much closer to conformity as Mobile PC applications. The Mobile PC agnostic Windows Form application used for this demonstration is the VB.NET version of the Black Jack Card Game Starter Kit sample application with either Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 as the development environment. The idea is to combine several distinct classes that manage screen size, ink, power and network connectivity separately into one Windows Form class that is easily inherited by a Mobile PC agnostic application. This article highlights some of the benefits of this approach.

The latest version of ASP.NET, version 2.0, supports several new and exciting features that promise to enhance developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance. One of these features is precompilation, which either developers or administrators can use to precompile ASP.NET applications before they are deployed. Moreover, the new precompilation feature can detect and provide warnings about any compilation failure issues, and lets you deploy applications without the need to store the source code on the deployment server. Precompilation can both reduce application response time and improve performance. This article explains how to use the new feature effectively.

Failing to adopt an appropriate testing approach to help identify bugs along the development process can have as devastating an impact on your project as a hurried or non-existent design. Fortunately, automated testing tools like AutomatedQA's TestComplete 5 make the process of creating structured testing affordable and significantly less time-consuming.

A library to parse and evaluate Excel-style formulas and recalculate in natural order

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) provides general-purpose, high-speed tracing of events raised by both user-mode applications and kernel-mode device drivers. Learn how ETW can improve your development and debugging work.

An article to demonstrate how to get system hardware information such as CPU ID, Hard Disk serial number and so on