I've been building controls for many years professionally and personally, but even back in VB6 days I just could not work this out. After all this time I remembered about it again.If I create a usercontrol/containercontrol and add one or more controls to the controls surface, I just cannot figure out how to access the controls at design time.
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Private Sub NamesControl_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
cmbo1.Items.Clear()
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How do I access parent form or container's other controls?
I have created a usercontrol that contains two rectangle shapes to create a unique button effect and a rounded-corner rectangle shape serving as a border to provide a look similar to a group box. It also contains two labels, one for use with a Text property of the control and the other to indicate the status of expansion of the control. The control is designed to collapse itself when the "button" is clicked leaving only the "button" visible. Clicking it again toggles this affect. I've dubbed it an ExpansionBar. It is also designed to be a container control so that I can add controls to it and allow these to disappear when the bottom portion collapses. The problem is that the controls contained in this usercontrol cannot be accessed during runtime. In other words, I can add a checkbox to it and it will disappear correctly when the control collapses, but I can't select the checkbox to check it... same thing with any other controls, you can see, but can't touch. I'm a novice developer, so I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
View 12 RepliesI'm making a quite large database management program(well actually 3 databases) and I am going to be creating a tab page for each database and under that a tab page for each table. each database has +- 200 tables and each of those has between 10 and 50 columns. I am also gonna put controls on each tab page of a table that represent a a row of data.I need very specific tooltips, functions for each table so generating it would be to complicated for me.
I need a automated way of creating controls on design time depending on the column datatype like a rich edit, text box or numeric up or down. and a label that has the same text as the column name It should also rename the name of the control to something appropriate .This can be done using visual studio's database wizard, but last time when I was about 30% done with one database it had already auto generated more than 1000000 lines of code. When I ran my program it took 10 minutes to show the first form and I have a powerful pc.
I vaguely remember something about a hotkey or menu that would group controls together at design time so you could drag 2 or more controls around and they would remain relative to eachother. You could work on something else and come back and the controls would still be grouped.
Does anybody know what this feature is called and how I can access it?
Now as the title says, I'm looking for guidance on some design-time support for the many custom controls I'm working on at the moment.At the moment I'm 3 months in on a Business and Inventory management system for my mothers business. It contains many, many custom controls I had to build from scratch because the ones provided just didn't cut it for what I needed. Now one in particular is a tab page control. Just as the provided TabControl Visual Studios supply's us. It has a lot of design time control. Such as clicking the tabs and adding controls to the panels being brought to front by the corresponding tab being clicked. I had a friend of mine try to show me what I had to do, but the way I had already built my control would have made it difficult - His words, so he never officially showed me anything. If it is true what he said then I can skip that, no problem. But adding the controls to the panels during design time I must have, but cannot seem to find anything through Google searches, text books or even kids majoring in software engineering.
View 4 RepliesI'm trying to make a collection class for buttons to address them as a whole, only I want to design the buttons at design time, and not add/set their properties programatically at runtime. Each button has its own image, so it doesn't seem right to add a bunch of lines of code which assign the properties when they're always going to be the same thing.Is it possible to create the controls at design time and then add them to an array at runtime? I did this, iterating through the buttons on the form and adding each of them to the class below.The problem is that once they're added they seem to be a different instance because changing their positions has no effect on the design-buttons on the form. Essentially i wanted the collection to be a reference to the items belonging to the form.Is that possible or should I be doing this a different way?[code]
View 2 RepliesI am using visual inheritance and was wondering if there is a way to change the properties of inherited controls at design time, preferably in the form designer. If not, then in the designer code. I have my control declared as Public in the base class. I can access it in the child form code, but not in the form designer. Is this just not possible?
View 3 RepliesI want to ask a question about adding controls in design time (controls may be any win form control or a user control) and adding the control in run time.
View 2 RepliesI've got a couple of these NumericUpDown controls I put on a form. Without describing too much about the form I basically want to update some variables each time one of these NumUD controls changes value. So for each NumUD I have a call to a Recalculate subroutine within their "changedValue" event.
There are actually two problems. First, if I initialize the "Value" property to something other than zero in VB2010 at DESIGN TIME it won't even open the form when I hit RUN. It gives me a "No Source Available. No symbols loaded for any call stack frame" error. The error box says "InvalidOperationException" was not handled. So if I try to set the initial value of the Value property to anything but zero of either I get this error.
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Recently i worked on a VB. I have to know how can create controls Dynamically on the run time and how can access these controls on the runtime??
Ex: I want to Create 10 checkboxes at runtime. After creating Checkboxes Dynamically how can i access these Checkboxes?? like i create Checkbox Called "chkAll" , If i check "ChkAll" checkbox then all Dynamic Checkboxes should be Check otherwise UnCheck?
I am trying to extend the functionality of the ToolStripPanel control (which is a panel hosting ToolStrips that can be moved during design-time, as I'm sure you know).One thing I wanted to add was a 'ToolStrips' property, which would be a collection of ToolStrips the user can edit via the collection editor in the designer. So instead of manually placing ToolStrips on the ToolStripPanel via the toolbox, the user can just use the property to add/remove (or even edit) them. This is of course similar to how you add/remove/edit TabPages in a TabControl.So, I came up with this code, which I have used successfully in the past for other controls:
Public Class cToolStripPanel
Inherits ToolStripPanel
Private _ToolStrips As New ToolStripCollection(Me)[CODE]....
The cToolStripPanel control inherits the ToolStripPanel control and adds the ToolStrips property, which is of type ToolStripCollection. That class, in turn, inherits the Collection(Of ToolStrip). In the InsertItem method, I add the 'item' ToolStrip to the cToolStripPanel. Of course I also need to override the RemoveItem / ClearItems methods but that's for another time.I am 100% sure that this code should works, at least for other controls. If you replace ToolStrip with Button (for example), I can add buttons via the property during design-time just fine, exactly the way I want it.But it seems that ToolStrips are special. When I try to Add a toolstrip (via the collection editor Add button), a null reference exception occurs. I've been trying to debug this all day and I've finally come up with a possible candidate for the problem... (I've actually used design-time debugging for the first time ever, which was pretty cool, and which showed me that the InsertItem method is not run!)
I think the problem is that the collection editor cannot create a new instance of the ToolStrip class. I can remember when trying to inherit from the ToolStrip, I was forced to add a constructor, because the ToolStrip "has more than one constructor that can be called with no arguments".Perhaps this is causing my problem? Do I (and if yes, how?) have to somehow control the creation of a new instance of the ToolStrip? Or am I completely off track and that is not what is causing the problem? I'm sure that it's a problem with the ToolStrip class, since I can use the exact same method with other controls just fine. It's only when I change the type to ToolStrip that it starts getting angry at me....
Is there a shortcut like CTRL + A which can select all controls in a container instead of all the controls in the form?
View 3 Repliesi'm building a control. then the control can be puted in form(or other container) and i need to know what controls are in that container. for now i don't put it to work:
Code:
Public Sub AllControlsName()
Dim i As Long
For i = 0 To Me.Container.Components.Count - 1
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Is there any way of adding a control to a container within a structure declaration in VB .NET?
What I would really like to do is:
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But this doesn't work in VB .NET. Is there anyway of achieving the same thing?
I have a custom control of type MyListControl with a Property called NotifiedList. I would like that when selecting that property in the Property Grid at runtime, that a dropdown list is populated with all the instances of type MyListControl that shared the same container as the original control.
View 3 Repliesjust trying to confirm wat i noticed in vs2008,when developing a web app(or wat ever), in my design view, i cant select multiple controls & set same properties i.e. width or CssClass for them all at once (available in vs 2005). i dont know, was it delibrately removed by ms?
View 4 RepliesI have a form-based application, that until recently displayed the controls on the form when in Design. For the last week or so, when I go to Design mode for the form, it is blank. However, the program does work correctly. And, I can see the control definitions in form.designer.vb. How can I get my form to display the controls again so I can add/move/change it going forward?
Visual Studio 2010
Window 7 64-bit OS on a Dell laptop
I've been coding an application over the last few months in VB.NET 2005 and have noticed that as the application is growing in size, I'm beginning to experience some strange behaviour in the IDE.For example : I have a tabcontrol docked in a form with 5 tabs. Each tab has a panel docked to it with several buttons, text fields, layout tables, datagrids etc. Sometimes immediately after saving the project, one of the tabs will go "white" and show no controls at all. There might be the odd outline of a control ( like you get when a control is hidden behind another ) but the only way to get them back is to close the project and open it again. It seems to be getting worse as the number of controls dropped onto the forms increases. Looking in the form designer.vb file I see that there are currently around 8000 lines.Is it possible that the designer file is so large that its having trouble loading/refreshing the view in the IDE ?
View 2 RepliesI am familer with looping thru controls like so:
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Next I have some labels on another form, that due to the design can't be in seperate panels. They are (lblChipColor1 - 6) and (lblChipValue1 - 7). I am trying to populate the color ones from the Array above. I can obviously loop thru the array, but I can't find a decent way to loop thru just the lblChipColorx lables ignoring the lblChipValue1x labels. It would be easy if they were on seperate panels. I tried adding the labels names to an array of type string and of type label, but got nowhere with that. Is there another way to group them, or build const array of label names, that I can work with?
Every once in awhile when I double click on a form in design mode (Windows Forms Application) that contains a tab control, all of the controls on the tab control disappear. I have to reopen the form to get them all back. In addition to this, the column order of my columns on any datagrid inside a tab control get rearranged when this happens. Is this a known bug and if so is there a hot fix or patch?
View 2 RepliesI need to create a few visual controls to reside on my form.
1- Rotary Selector to rotate and select an option. (maybe up to 16 steps per rotation or 0 to 15.)
2- Rotary dial to act like a volume control. This actually selects a value between 0 to 255 or 0 to 1023. (is this too many steps?)
3- Bunch of selector push buttons to act like the old car radio selector? (pushing one resets the other buttons. Just like old car radios?)
Assume you have controls A, B, C, D and E all with a Visibility property. You also have states 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 in which various combinations of your controls would be displayed. Currently this is being handled by switch statements for each state: i.e.
Select Case PageState
case "1"
a.visible = false
b.visible = true
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As you can imagine, this becomes a pain as every state needs a show/hide statement for each control. How can I refactor this so that adding controls and/or states becomes trivial?My first instinct is to extend the control and add a collection of states that it should display for but this sounds like overkill.
Edit:I was deliberately vague in my question in case this has other implications. In my current instance the "controls" in question are ASP Panels. Does that change anything?
I am using VB2008 express and I have created a form etc.
But any changes I make in the IDE dont appear in the run time. It seems to revert to another version at run time and I dont know how. I have tried adding new code, i tested this with a 'form load messagebox', but it does not appear. I also added a new button and resized the form but none of these changes are appearing, I really have no clue as to what is happening. I have turned of the veriosning in the project settings.
I wanted to know if anyone could tell me how to access the Click_event.I have a boarderles form with a panel control which has the Dock property set to fill and on the panel I have placed a Label also with the Dock property set to fill. I also have a timer running.How can I get code to execute in the Label1 click event.I've tried doing it by using the generic Click_event and also with two variations of the Click_event Handles parameters
'Alternativ 1:
Private Sub Form1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Label1.Click
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There is newer code in a follow up post. I suggest using the code in the later post rather than the code in this one. You can still read this post though. When designing a user interface, one should be conscious of how many individual controls are required to implement the functionality. In some cases an initial design may begin with many buttons or textboxes (for example) but then further review of
the actual required functionality allows for a reduction in the number of unique controls.
But other times, there isn't a better way (which will still make sense to the user of the application) then to have a series of many repeated controls. So in the cases where one can be certain that the best UI implementation for an application will require the use of multiple copies of a given control, then it often becomes necessary to maintain some method of managing all of those controls at various points
throughout the application. Doing so typically requires that one build up some collection of controls which can then be accessed by index in order to work with any given control; but this can lead to a lot of clutter in the code file which handles these control's events. For instance there will be some kind of collection declaration, some recursive routine to find all of the controls of interest, and then any number of event handler methods with long lists of Handles clauses, or additional code loops to wire up the event handling for each control.
Purpose Since most of this functionality could be considered a requirement regardless of the type of control being managed, or its required functionality, it may make sense to wrap all of the control management functionality into a single class. And since our first requirement is a collection of controls, then a base collection class could be the perfect starting point for our control manager. There are a number of existing thread around this topic, with some recent (at the time of this writing) ones being:[URL]..In this, and related, threads I have posted examples of a simple TextBoxManager and ButtonManager control. But again, with so much similar functionality required regardless of the control being managed, it would be technically possible to create a generic ControlManager(Of T As Control) class which can manage any type of control.
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So in summary, one can facilitate managing a large number of user interface controls by building a "control manager" class which both encapsulates the list of control instances, and deals with adding and removing defined event handlers for every control it manages. The generic control manager class itself can be inherited and extended into a more specific class on a per-application basis in order to provide more application-specific functionality. Reed Kimble - "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
If I have the following ListView, how can I attach a SelectedIndexChanged event listener to the DropDownList so I can perform a command on the respective object? Imagine I have a list of new users and I want to add them to a usergroup by selecting the group from the DropDownList.
<asp:ListView ID="NewUsers" runat="server" DataSourceID="NewUsersSDS" DataKeyNames="ID">
<LayoutTemplate>
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I have a maximized form that has controls at the top of it and a large DataGridView that is docked below all the controls. Its kind of like the Ribbon in MS Office. The controls cover about 1/4 of the screen at the top. I would like a way for the user to click a button to hide all the controls then automatically expand into the place the controls were so the user can view more data in the DataGridView and visa versa. For example, in MS Office Excel you can hide the ribbon by clicking a tiny button that has "^" on it.
I'm not very familiar with all the controls in Visual Studio so I would like to hear some recommendations. Is this situation ideal for a SplitContainer or ToolStripContainer or am I way off base here?
When adding controls to a form at runtime, you can do either of the following:
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I am adding controls to form at run time.I am doing the following with no problem:
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