Windows Forms New Features - 2008 Volume 1

WinTree™ - Enhanced

In NetAdvantage for Windows Forms 2007 Volume 3, you may recall that we gave you the Microsoft® Windows® Vista® look and feel for your WinToolbarsManager™ components; now, you get support for Windows Vista style on our WinTree™ control! By emulating the modern look and feel of the Windows Explorer found in Windows Vista, your Windows Forms applications can display this present day appearance simply by flipping a switch.

Vista Veneer Extends to WinTree

There's so much you can customize in the Windows Vista style of your application's tree views now that you would expect a lot of properties that you would need to mess around with, right? That's where NetAdvantage for Windows Forms 2008 Volume 1 does you a tremendous service, by simplifying your tree's Vista styling down to one property: the DisplayStyle property. Set this property to WindowsVista and you are finished styling the entire WinTree control! It's just that easy.

That doesn't mean there aren't additional properties that you can't customize to tweak certain behaviors (usually within the limits of what Windows Vista would allow), because there are, but to get the standard Windows Vista look and feel all it takes is that one property setting. A few of the exciting Windows Vista styles that you'll see exposed by the WinTree in the WindowsVista DisplayStyle include:

• Scrolling - WinTree automatically scrolls the tree view horizontally to bring the current node into sight.
• Expansion Indicators - These little images sport the WindowsVista color scheme, and tell your user whether a node is expanded or can be expanded.
  
  
  
  
• Colors - Taken from the WindowsVistaColorScheme object, you'll see that selected and hot tracked nodes display in a cool blue gradient. You'll also see these colors in the expansion indicators mentioned above.
  
  
  
  
• ToolTips - When the entire node's name cannot fit into the available space, a ToolTip displays the entire node's name. This ToolTip looks just like the node would if it had not run out of space.
  
  
  
  
• Headers - When displaying multiple columns in your tree view you will see a new header style that closely resembles that of the Windows Vista Explorer.
  
  
  
  

Select Nodes From Any Level

Another one of the new features present in the WinTree control you get as part of NetAdvantage for Windows Forms 2008 Volume 1 is the ability to allow users to select as many tree nodes as they want, in as many different levels of the tree control as your application needs. You don't need to perform any extra work in order to turn this functionality on, it just works. However, if you want to manipulate the SelectedNodes collection based on the tree nodes coming from different levels, you will need to sort through the nodes collection and identify which Node belongs to which Level.

WinTrackBar™ - Brand NEW !

The new track bar control in this release is called the WinTrackBar, and it is a simple editor that helps your end user choose values from a range; but not just a single range of values, but as many ranges as your .NET application requires. Each range of values that you want the WinTrackBar to display to your users can be customized by you, and you can have as little or as many tick marks in the range as necessary for your application - fine grained or coarse grained movement are equally well supported.

WinTrackBar's look and feel is something you can completely customize for your needs. You can orient this track bar control horizontally (its default orientation), or you can have it stand-on-end in a vertical orientation. You can also change where the tick marks are situated on the track bar, such as having them display on the top or bottom when WinTrackBar is oriented horizontally, and the left or the right if WinTrackBar is oriented vertically.

This track bar also comes with a full array of looks and feels. If you are using the Office 2007 theme that includes the ribbon from WinToolbar™ and the collapsible Outlook™ pane of the WinExplorerBar™ then you can complement them with an Office 2007 track bar, similar to the one your users might see in Microsoft Word™.

Alternately, you can style the WinTrackBar control to implement your own Windows Vista track bar seen in the Views drop-down box of the Windows Vista Explorer. This would go along very well with the Windows Vista theme of the WinToolbarsManager component added in the last release and the WinTree Vista Style described in the section above.

WinTab™ and WinTabbedMdiManager™ - NEW Closed Button Added

Both Mozilla® Firefox® and Microsoft Internet Explorer® allow users to browse the Internet using a tabbed interface, thereby allowing users to work with multiple Web sites open at the same time. Both of these browsers allow you to close individual Web pages by clicking on the close button located on the right side of each tab. Granted, both browsers may implement the close button in their own way, but now that NetAdvantage for Windows Forms has added a close button to the WinTab and WinTabbedMdiManager controls, you too can add tab-closing functionality to your own applications.

The new close button on the tab control and the tabbed MDI (multiple document interface) manager is more customizable than you would think. Along with exposing all of the standard capabilities of our Presentation Layer Framework™ such as an Appearance object to change the look, color and borders of the close button, you get several display and position features to help you fine tune your application's tabs. The close button can be exposed on your tabs in several positions based on the CloseButtonVisibility property:

• Do not display any close button at all.
• Close button appears in the selected tab only.
• Close button is shown on both the selected and hot tracked tabs.
• Close button should appear on every tab.
• Display the close button only in the header area, next to the scroll buttons.

That isn't all. Once you have set where on your tabs you want the close button to appear, you can further hone the appearance of your application by deciding whether it should appear near (before any tab content) or far (after any tab content) by setting its CloseButtonAlignment, displaying on either the left or right (top or bottom) edges of the tab depending on how it is oriented and its content is laid out. This functionality works the same whether you are using WinTab, WinTabStrip™ or WinTabbedMdiManager.

WinListView™ - Enhanced

The list view control can display several columns of data through its Details view, which allows you to add extra detail about each item in the main column. For NetAdvantage for Windows Forms 2008 Volume 1, we have added functionality to allow end users to automatically resize each column of the list view so that the columns fit within the horizontal space available. The user can automatically resize columns by double-clicking on the right side of the column header. Alternatively, you can control the resizing through the new APIs that we've added.

The newly introduced AutoFitColumns property turns this new feature on for you, while the ColumnAutoSizeMode property determines exactly how you want the columns to resize when your user has double-clicked one of the column headers. However, you do not have to wait for the end user to interact with the list view in order to auto-size its columns. With the PerformAutoSize method, you can auto-size the WinListView's columns whenever you need to; you can even specify the type of resizing to perform through an optional parameter to one of its overloads.

Full Support for Visual Studio® 2008 - NEW!

NetAdvantage for Windows Forms 2008 Volume 1 includes full support for the Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008 integrated development environment (IDE). All .NET controls and components have been tested fully to ensure they function in this productivity-enhancing new environment.