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Feb 17th, 2012, 04:45 AM
#1
Thread Starter
Lively Member
Graphics Packages for improving look and feel of UI
Hi,
I am looking for recommendations with regards to any tips and suggestions on the improvement of the look and feel of windows forms designed in vb.net studio.
I was used Krypton but my trial ran out and I am looking for other packages, tools or ways to improve the look of my forms.
Can anyone suggest any ideas?
Thanks
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Feb 17th, 2012, 08:04 AM
#2
Re: Graphics Packages for improving look and feel of UI
Thread moved from the 'Database Development' forum to the 'VB.Net' (VB2002 and later) forum.
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Feb 17th, 2012, 11:15 AM
#3
Re: Graphics Packages for improving look and feel of UI
Originally Posted by AC1982
Hi,
I am looking for recommendations with regards to any tips and suggestions on the improvement of the look and feel of windows forms designed in vb.net studio.
I was used Krypton but my trial ran out and I am looking for other packages, tools or ways to improve the look of my forms.
Can anyone suggest any ideas?
Thanks
Hi Krypton,
If you are not satisfied with the possibilities of Windows Forms, you should definitely look at WPF. You get it together with Visual Studio 2008+ including the free Express editions, and it's designed in the first place for creating high-quality GUIs. Unlike the System.Drawing classes, it takes good advantage of hardware acceleration. Among other things it provides better support for animations and for perspective 3D. You can provide its code in VB.Net, although it also makes extensive use of the declarative language XAML.
The main drawback is that it is quite a steep learning curve if you are coming from Windows Forms and GDI+. Unfortunately it seems relatively hard to find detailed help on forums.
BB
Last edited by boops boops; Feb 17th, 2012 at 12:04 PM.
Reason: typo
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Feb 17th, 2012, 12:29 PM
#4
Re: Graphics Packages for improving look and feel of UI
Originally Posted by boops boops
Hi Krypton,
If you are not satisfied with the possibilities of Windows Forms, you should definitely look at WPF. You get it together with Visual Studio 2008+ including the free Express editions, and it's designed in the first place for creating high-quality GUIs. Unlike the System.Drawing classes, it takes good advantage of hardware acceleration. Among other things it provides better support for animations and for perspective 3D. You can provide its code in VB.Net, although it also makes extensive use of the declarative language XAML.
I would agree with this as you have full control over how everything looks and behaves. If you go with the WPF route I'd stress that you get the Expression Studio suite as it can make a lot of the styling, animation and behavior modification trivial.
Originally Posted by boops boops
The main drawback is that it is quite a steep learning curve if you are coming from Windows Forms and GDI+. Unfortunately it seems relatively hard to find detailed help on forums.
Not sure if you meant to say "steep learning curve" as that means it's very easy to pick up.
That being said once I learned XAML and how things tied together this option makes more sense and is easier to work with.
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Here's some links to get you started if you decide to go that route:
http://windowsclient.net/learn/
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...6-19daee04147a
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/wpf/threads
http://social.expression.microsoft.c...zh/wpf/threads
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Feb 17th, 2012, 12:49 PM
#5
Re: Graphics Packages for improving look and feel of UI
Originally Posted by MattP
Not sure if you meant to say "steep learning curve" as that means it's very easy to pick up.
Well spotted Matt: I meant the opposite. I should stick to my usual metaphor of "a steep hill to climb".
But that's a bit subjective. Perhaps there is a good book that will help. I'll admit I have not bothered much about interface design because I am mostly interested in using WPF as a graphics package per se. And my problem has been finding my way in the dozens of different Bitmap and Image variants rather than learning XAML thoroughly.
BB
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Feb 17th, 2012, 02:46 PM
#6
Thread Starter
Lively Member
Re: Graphics Packages for improving look and feel of UI
Thanks for all the valuable information it looks like I have a lot of reading to do.
I have already done a lot of coding for my application but the GUI is designed with windows forms. If I replace the windows forms with wpf as my GUI does that mean I need to start coding from scratch again?
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