It is windowless, as the original.
It can be used as a direct replacement of the original VB-Shape control (by manually editing the *.frm source files... for the one familiar with doing that).
Perhaps the main feature over the original control is that is is antialiased. It means that the shape is rendered with more quality:
The second new feature is that it has more shapes.
Here there is a screenshot:
New properties:
Opacity: as the names says, it sets the opacity -or transparency-.
RotationDegrees: the shape can be rotated 0-360º.
Mirrored: it flips the shape horizontally.
CurvingFactor: This value applies to shapes that are not normally curved like the rectangle, the triangle and several others. It produces new figures by curving the edges. It accepts values in the range from -100 to 100. 0 meaning not curved.
Shift: It is an additional value used by some controls: triangle scalene, kite, diamond, trapezoid, parallelogram, star, jagged star, arrow, crescent and talk. It accepts positive and negative values. Most useful values will be often in the range of -10 to 50.
Vertices: Value used by these shapes: regular polygon, star and jagged star.
Quality: High or Low (antialiased or not).
Clickable: It determines whether the control will raise mouse events or not. If False, any control behind it will receive the events instead.
This control uses subclassing.
Requirements: it uses GDI+, it was introduced in Windows XP.
Changelog:
22-mar-19 Original release
29-mar-19 Latest update: Improvements, bug fixes. Added another shape. Now the "talk" shape can accept negative values in the Shift property.
Special thanks to LaVolpe, wqweto and The trick.
Last edited by Eduardo-; Apr 1st, 2019 at 07:14 AM.
Hello. To add text there is a control that is specific: the Label. Put a label over the shape and set the backstyle to transparent.
I don't know if there is much of a a point in adding the capacity to draw text to the ShapeEx control, since it is quite easy to put a label inside the shape.
The difficulty in adding text capacity to the ShapeEx control itself is that the text should not go outside of the shape, and for some shapes that is quite difficult to do (or impossible).
So, what's the problem in adding a label over it? You can place the label exactly in the position that you want, after you has set up the shape that you wanted.
If I decide to add the text capacity (may be in the future), perhaps it will be restricted only to some shapes.
Originally Posted by DaveDavis
or drag to resize and movement like MS Office, it will be useful in many applications.
I don't know what you mean, could you explain?
Do you mean it to have at run-time some similar capacity as the controls have in the IDE (of showing grips and being able to be moved and resized by the user)?
Last edited by Eduardo-; Mar 29th, 2019 at 09:29 PM.
... perhaps it will be restricted only to some shapes.
yes, for star etc, it is not grace to have text into.
Originally Posted by Eduardo-
Do you mean it to have at run-time some similar capacity as the controls have in the IDE (of showing grips and being able to be moved and resized by the user)?
I means we can adjust size at run-time or design-time using mouse.
Hi Eduardo, I'm checking your ShapeEx, I'm going to use it to test wqweto's MST.
Your ShapeEx is great, which can generate a lot of irregular graphics, but these graphics are rarely used in our programming. If your ShapeEx could generate Win10 system icons, its usefulness will be greatly improved.
Hi Eduardo, I'm checking your ShapeEx, I'm going to use it to test wqweto's MST.
Your ShapeEx is great, which can generate a lot of irregular graphics, but these graphics are rarely used in our programming. If your ShapeEx could generate Win10 system icons, its usefulness will be greatly improved.
Hello,
Where are all those Windows 10 icons?
Perhaps I'll make them at some point.
About the shapes, I probably never used any shape in my programs, or at least I can't remember.
The original purpose of this control was to make a shape control replacement but antialiased.
Anyway, I think that a SVG renderer would be more useful.
Amazing contribution Eduardo!!!
Im working hard on gattering control replacements to give vb6 a modern look. For the IDE Im using AxTools wich is awesome and some controls I found so far are this and the SSTabEx (extended version of sheridan tabs).
Do you have any more usefull replacements or cool controls to share? (send me a private if you want)
Im working on creating a set of new controls (a new button with tons of propertys, shadow and autocreate disabled icon) now I changed to ShapeEx for the background object.
Do you have any transparent rotated antialiased label control?
I also coded the only Flat combo box arround after not finding anyone wich works (Right now works, but I want to push it a little more and completely replace the dropdown graphic)
I also coded the only Flat combo box arround after not finding anyone wich works (Right now works, but I want to push it a little more and completely replace the dropdown graphic)
What I do is to set the controls to use the Windows theme, then the comboboxes (and other controls) appear flat.
I tried that approach but the problem is that if you relay on themes you dont really know how it will really look on the client machines. For example my work computer has themes disabled, my home computer got aero (win7) and my laptop windows10. I want to have controls that dont depend on user themes/colors/windows version so I can design wysiwyg and provide the same user experience.
Yes, but most of them fail to be fully flat or are not based on standard ComboBox (cant replace the component and get everything working wich is not good for big projects)
Thanks Eduardo! As you can see that one fail to do a full flat on the bottom line. I based my work on that one and modified the paint proc to my taste.
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