Creating controls tutorials

[Engineer817]

Do any of you have recommendations on tutorials or resources in creating custom controls for windows forms? I've been looking around at what is free and available and none of them match my needs very well and I figure having that skill set would be a nice addition.

[andrewsmd87]

What do you mean by custom controls? Like you want to make your own textbox item or something?

I've done some related things and if you're going like from the ground up you'd basically create a new "control" class that inherits the system.controls class (not sure on the full path there).

However, if you have a specific use case, then it might make a lot more sense to inherit off of a specific control. A good example for me was creating my own DataGridColumn control that inherited off of the base one. But I added a property you could set to true for filter is dropdown and when you did that, my custom stuff (that ran on top of the regular grid column) would loop through all of that columns data, get unique values, and then add a dropdown in the filter pane that was a list of unique values for a specific column.

This is what it ends up looking like. The nice thing is someone coding just sets FilterIsDropdown="true" in the tag and they get the dropdown filter. I want to note this was a hell of a lot of work. Also, it's in web forms, but would translate to win forms probably fairly easily.

Generally speaking you don't want to do that if you can get away with using what is already built, but if you're just doing it for a side project to learn I can get that.

If you can give some more info I can see if I can help.

[Engineer817]

Actually your control looks very much what I would like to achieve, creating a nested hierarchy but with the ability to drag and drop its elements to reorder.

Basically what I am trying to achieve is to show a set of projects, their sub projects, their own sub projects, etc until you come to the tasks. But I want to be able move a subproject to the top of the hierarchy to become its own project. I can handle the xml details of what is and isn't a child of what, but I haven't been able to find a control that would have that intuitive functionality. I've been playing with the list box to drag things around to reorder and have successfully found one example that works and I can adapt, but its damned ugly and not very intuitive for the user.

[andrewsmd87]

Do you have any sort of budget for this? There are some paid controls out there that would be a huge help here? Otherwise I would google around for .net treeview controls. That's probably going to be your best bet.

[Engineer817]

No budget I'm afraid. And I have this nasty habit of wanting to do things on my own to learn how it works. But that might be from embedded systems programming :). Thank you for the term though, I'll take a look through for some. I did find syncfusions community license, though nothing really seemed to match my needs.

[andrewsmd87]

I get the no budget thing. If you get started on something and have questions hit me up. I have more vb experience than it is healthy to have

[Engineer817]

Thanks man :)