COMPONENTAGE Software - Dialog Workshop .NET

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Dialog Workshop .NET

Overview What's new

The .NET Framework contains components that present standard dialog boxes (such as File Open, Font, etc.), which you can use in your applications. But standard dialog components are very simple – its not possible to extend these dialogs by adding extra controls, provide custom message processing.

COMPONENTAGE Software presents you new component toolkit – Dialog Workshop .NET. This component set allows you to extend standard common dialogs in many ways:

Add extra controls in your dialogs using .NET Windows Forms.

You can extend your dialogs and add new controls in a dialog window to provide more features in the standard dialogs. For example, you can add your own Windows Form with some additional checkboxes (1), preview pane (see Tutorial 1) in open/save dialogs, etc:

These docked parts of the dialog are actually Windows Forms. You can specify docked forms both at design and run-time. At design-time you specify Windows Form class name which will be instantiated at run-time. Also you can specify at run-time exact Windows Form instance as docked part of a dialog. Note that you do not need to leave the Visual Studio.NET or use any external tool to design these form or dock it to a dialog (forget about resources, resource editors, templates, hooks, etc.). You can specify docked form class names (and other dialog properties) using Properties Window or the Dialog Designer (choose Dialog Designer item from dialog component context menu).

Custom dialog box title.

You can set dialog box title using Title property (2) even at run-time. Also you can set dialog's icon using CustDlgParams.Icon property.

Customizable dialog items captions.

You can provide custom texts for all items in your dialogs (3). For example you can replace Open text in the dialog above. Use DlgItemsCaptions property to specify custom strings.

Customizable dialog startup position.

Specify initial dialog position relative to screen center, application main form center or dialog component owner form center. You can set it using Dialog Designer (as well as Properties Window). Also you can specify X and Y offsets which allow you to control exact position of the dialog. For example you can specify that the dialog should be positioned on 10 pixels to the right from the screen center (X Shift = 10).

New events: Show, Hide, FileOk, SelectionChanged, etc.

All dialog components have Show, Hide, AcceptDialog, CancelDialog events. Also all components have dialog-specific events. For example, FolderChanged, SelectionChanged, FileOk, etc. events for Open/Save File dialogs.

Full design-time support

Dialog Workshop .NET provides full design-time support:

    - You can specify class names of docked forms in design-time instead of creating form instances in run-time (but of course you can use second approach).
    - Dialog Designer allows you to set most of extended properties using a modal dialog without writing a line of code and even without using the Properties Window.
    - Dialog Preview feature! You can preview a dialog in design-time without running your application or leaving IDE. Just choose Preview item in the dialog context menu in the Form Designer. The dialog will be displayed.

Modeless dialogs, dialogs inside your own form

Using special CaModelessDialog component, you can display Windows common dialog as modeless window or even insert it into another window (your own Windows Form)! Just set CaModelessDialog.Dialog property and call it's Show method!

Dialog-specific features.

All dialog components have task-specific properties which do not exist in original .NET dialog components. The following new features exist in Open/Save dialogs:

Extended file listview styles: you can show grid lines, enable "Track Select" (hover) mode, full row select mode, etc (6).

You can disable Delete and/or Rename commands in Open/Save dialogs. So you can make your application even more safe: user will not be able to remove and rename anything (3)! Rename/Delete commands are disabled in the context menu and also its not possible to rename/delete an object using keyboard (pressing F2/Del).

You can show or hide the PlacesBar. Also you can change PlacesBar items captions (5).

You can disable context menus in the file list view (both selected item's menu and selected folder's one).

MRU files list (Recent tab) can be added in the dialog box (4).

You can specify file list view style programmatically using DefaultFileListViewStyle and/or EffectiveFileListViewStyle properties.

Custom context menu/context menu strip can be used as drop-down menu for OK button (7).

Currently, Dialog Workshop .NET contains the following 11 dialog components:

CaOpenFileDialog - pre-configured File Open dialog box. Its similar to the Windows Forms' OpenFileDialog component, but it has many new and unique features, described above.

CaSaveFileDialog - pre-configured File Save dialog box. Similar to CaOpenFileDialog, but for saving a file.

CaFolderDialog - Displays a dialog box that enables the user to select a Shell folder.

CaPrintDialog - Print common dialog box. Based on standard Windows Print dialog.

CaPageSetupDialog - Print common dialog box. Based on standard Windows Print dialog.

CaFontDialog - Common dialog box for font selection. Based on standard Windows Font dialog box.

CaColorDialog - Common dialog box for font selection. Based on standard Windows Color dialog box.

CaAboutDialog - the dialog component that displays Shell About dialog box.

CaPickIconDialog - the dialog component that displays Pick Icon dialog box.

CaRunDialog - the dialog component that displays File Run dialog box.

CaModelessDialog - allows displaying Windows common dialogs as modeless windows.

You can download Dialog Workshop .NET evaluation version from this site. If you find it useful, you can register this software for developing of your commercial applications.

COMPATIBILITY ISSUES

Some Dialog Workshop .NET components internally are wrappers for Win32 and shell functions. But you do not need to worry about it since dialog components hide its internal data and methods. Its important, that your applications do not use Windows-specific source code at all (we encapsulate all platform-specific calls). In case of Open/Save dialogs if JIT compiler founds that current platform is not Windows, standard FileOpen dialog component is used and additional properties have no affect. Later object model which currently implemented in this release can be implemented (with the same full functionality) on other .NET platforms using other platform-specific source code and .NET classes. Due to encapsulation your applications will be able to migrate to new platforms without additional efforts, since interface part of our components will remain unchanged. Full-featured non-Windows versions will be available after .NET release for other platforms.

Dialog Workshop .NET is CLS-compliant. So the library has a guarantee of interoperability with a wide range of .NET programming languages and libraries.

Also our MSIL code and associated metadata meet type safety requirements.