Windows Forms 2005 Chat Transcript

For all those who are interested in what Windows Forms 2005 will offer for developers, i managed to get this from the chat session. These are all the questions the participants asked and answered by the Microsoft guys.

Ed_H_MS (Moderator): Welcome to today’s chat on New Windows Forms Features in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1. We have members of the Windows Forms team here to answer your questions today. I will ask the hosts to introduce themselves.

Jim_MS (Expert): My name is Jim Galasyn, and I'm a Programmer/Writer for the .NET Client User Education team.

Mike_MS (Expert): Hi my name is Mike Harsh. I'm a program manager on the Windows Forms team.

Joe_MS (Expert): My name is Joe Stegman, I'm a Program Manager on the Windows Forms team.

Ed_H_MS (Moderator): And I am Ed Hickey, Visual Basic MVP Lead. Glad you all could make it today!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: Will the Windows forms controls such as the imagelist control support 32-bit icons w/ alpha?

A: Yes, we've fixed quite a few bugs in this area since Beta 1.

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: More of a request than a question i guess. So far i have to say that Windows Forms controls are missing a list view and tree view dedicated to showing the contents of your HD, so little to no user programming is needed to display such information but of g

A: We currently have no plans to provide an intregated listview/treeview combo that is used to navigate the computer hard drive.

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: The express edition is a subset of the Professional version of visual studio right?

A: From a feature perspective, yes they are. But the Express editions also come bundled with sample applications and have a different default option set tuned for the hobbyist developer.


Ed_H_MS (Moderator):
Q: will team system be launched together with Visual Studio 2005?

A: I really don't know, hopefully I can find an answer for you by the end of the chat. I could guess, but that's not very helpful...

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: Mark but why not, this would be a very useful feature in my opinion, especially in the express line of products. If you have no plans for such controls then i request you put a tutorial somewhere on MSDN that shows you how to mod the current Controls

A: Great point about having a sample. I'll file a doc bug to have a sample that demonstrates this.

Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: What are the New Features in Windows Forms 2005 Beta 1 ?

A: There are a number of new features in Windows Forms 2005. We have a new deployment technology called ClickOnce (worthy of a chat all by itself). We've added several new professional controls including Office like menu and toolbars as well as an improved data grid control. We've added MaskedTextBox, SplitContainer, WebBrowser, TableLayout and a FlowLayout controls. We added a bunch of new design time features such as snap lines and smart tasks (this demos much better than me rambling on about it). We've added a simple sound API, an async component and done a lot to make working with data easier. We've added a new configuration API to make it easier to write applicaiton and user settings. Finally, we've done a lot of enhancements to our existing controls.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: Does the Express versions provide support for PocketPC programming?

A: The Express sku does not currently support PocketPC.

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: With the tooltip control how it can now become a balloon tooltip, will it be possible to have it bindable to other controls such as the try icon control and have click events like when Windows XP displays the desktop cleanup wizard?

A: We are looking into the possibility of adding balloon tooltip support for the NotifyIcon.

Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: Joe: thanks for the Outlook sample on windowsforms.net. It shows some interesting techniques

A: Sure - I'll be updating the sample when we ship Beta 2. There's some new work we've done with ToolStrips and DataGridView that will make this even easier.

Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: You mentioned Office like controls. Are you talking Office 2002 or Office 2003? For example, what about the Help panels in Office 2003?

A: We've added new Office like ToolBars and Menus (Office 2003). This means we support the look and feel of Office 2003 menus and toolbars out of the box (however we allow you to customize out look and feel to your hearts content). As for the Office Help Pane, although we don't ship an Office Help Pane in the box, you can build that type of Control using our ToolBars. See the Beta 1 samples on http://www.windowsforms.net/Default....bey%20Beta%201 for examples of this (see Messenger, Outlook and Money).

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: Windows Forms is touted as being the way to go for Windows programming, however only a handfull of Microsoft tools are available that use Windows Forms.... When are we going to see more internal commitment to this technology

A: The largest internal partner building with Windows Forms is SQL 2005. The entire SQL management toolset is being rewritten with Windows Forms. The Team Server product is also written largely with Windows Forms as are the majority of new UI and dialogs in Visual Studio 2005. Aside from all that, there are dozens of internal tools that are being created with Windows Forms. All this dogfooding has helped make Windows Forms 2.0 a much more robust solution for building apps.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: This is a request... a better way of managing panels. When I multiple panels that occupy the same location, it's awkard to get the panel I want to work with in the IDE. And if I offset them, and align them in code, then I don't have WYSIWYG.

A: You can always pick particular controls or components from the Properties window. The first field is a dropdown that lists all the controls/components on your form.

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: When are Windows Forms or managed code going to be introduced for the DDK? Like for Printer drivers

A: The WinFX initiative has plans to expose a lot more of the operating system to managed code programming. You can find out more about WinFX on MSDN.com.

thanks,
mark

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: When are Windows Forms or managed code going to be introduced for the DDK? Like for Printer drivers

A: I'm not sure when the driver kit will officially adopt Windows Forms, but I do know that some drivers are written with Windows Form 1.1 today. For instance the ATI Catalyst driver (http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html) uses Windows Forms for it's display properties tab pages.


MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: If you see user interfaces like the one in Media Center, is this an area where Windows Forms would be falling short? Are there plans to add animation to Windows Forms?

A: Currently since we rely on the underlying operating system treeview we have no way to change this. You can owner draw the treeview (new feature in Whidbey) that allows you to control how it looks.

Maybe in the future the operatin system will provide more control over the treeview.


Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: I saw in the VS 2005 Express, a lot of changes in the ADO.net components. How many changes I'll must do to convert my Vs 2003 applications to 2005 ? (on ado access)

A: I'm not an expert on ADO.NET and can't speak to all their changes however, in general, we always try and preserve runtime behavior between versions. Are you referring to design time differences?

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: Yes, I'm aware of being able to select the control via the Properties panel. I'm just wishing for a nicer solution (that list of controls can get long). One possibility is maybe being able to 'park' them in that area under the form (what's it called?)

A: You're thinking of the Component Tray. This is where components, which have no visual representation otherwise, can participate in the design environment. Whidbey will also ship with a Document Outline that gives you a tree representation of controls on your form, with parent/child relationships.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: Maybe the Document Outline is the answer... Thanks.

A: It's a pretty neat feature!

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: Could you say there are any suprise controls coming our way perhaps?

A: There are no plans to add any surprise controls to the VS 2005 release from what has been identified. Sorry.

Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: When will VS.NET add controls such as the task pane one in Windows XP?

A: We don't have a TaskPane in VS 2005 however we will be shipping a TaskPane sample in the SDK.

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: will things like Office contain Windows Forms, or do they already

A: We have plans to support this in Visual Studio 2005. Please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/vsto/default.aspx

Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: More specific, i mean, will Access 2003 or Access 12 (whatever) contain win forms to program my user interfaces with)

A: We allow you to build Windows Forms UIs on top of an Access database today however Access does not use Windows Forms for their GUI engine.

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: I'm not sure if it's appropiate to this chat, but here's my user control question. I tried implementing an user control that contained a panel control. But, when I inserted my user control into my application, I wasn't able to drop additional controls

A: The solution for this is to add a ParentControlDesigner DesignerAttribute to your UserControl. To do this (in C#), add a reference to System.Design.dll. Add a using statement for System.Windows.Forms.Design and then add the following attribute to your class:

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: I'm not sure if it's appropiate to this chat, but here's my user control question. I tried implementing an user control that contained a panel control. But, when I inserted my user control into my application, I wasn't able to drop additional controls

A: [Designer(typeof(ParentControlDesigner))]

This will allow you to add other controls to your UserControl. You won't be able to select or edit any of the controls originally in the UserControl however.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: I know this is not a Windows Forms question, but is there a patch or something for the recent projects list in VS.NET 2003 where when you modify your project, the date doesn't change? Or do we have to wait for VS.NET 2005?

A: This behavior is by design -- the date changes if you make changes to the solution file itself (for example, rename it through Solution Explorer), but not if you change one of the other "content" files.

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: Mike: thanks. Sounds just like what I'm looking for.

A: Sure, no problem.

Joe_MS (Expert):
Q: Joe, would MS consider replacing what is used, for WinForms, if MS want early adopters, most schools teach Access GUI programming, so why not give them some winform goodness to start off with and continue the trend

A: That's a good suggestion. We're constantly looking for ways to integrate our technologies within MS and that's an area we can look at in the future.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: How much releases would it take for larger products like Office to be converted to such an extend that you could start calling it a .NET application?

A: We are releasing VSTO (http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/vsto/default.aspx), which provides managed wrappers around the Office API.

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: Windows Forms are fairly flexible for Client Area, but what about Non-Client area?

A: Windows forms does not provide any help for non-client area development -- you basically need to goto the underlying WndProc and handle the appropriate windows messages. You can probably find some examples online for doing some non-client area programming.

-mark

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: So is it possible to have it tell you for the 'content' files and not just the solution or do we have to live with it?

A: I imagine it's possible to write a VS plug-in with the VSIP types, but I don't think there's any way to get this behavior out of the box.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: Jim: I wouldn't call wrappers native support but a workaround to at least be able to support .NET... let's not mention COM Shims if one would want to build add-ins that don't trigger the Macro bells and whistles in Office

A: We'll be supporting VBA for a couple more versions, but if you're looking for Office to be re-implemented with the .NET Framework...I wouldn't hold my breath.

MarkRi_MS (Expert):
Q: risking an "rtfm" answer, is there a command-line box control that could be popped into an otherwise regular winform? I don't remember seeing one when I installed vcsexpress (during a remote desktop session), and now I can't get it to load anymore...

A: No there isn't.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: I recon theres a bug in folder browser dialog, open one, click make a new folder and it shall with the cursor already in the renaming position for you to just type a name, now create a new folder in that folder and youd have to manually select the rename

A: I just repro'd this with Whidbey bits. Thanks for reporting this, and I'll check the bug database to make sure it'

Mike_MS (Expert):
Q: with ImageLists, how do you get access to all the good MS icons? how about a place like the office marketplace to download royalty free icons?

A: We have worked with the Office team and will be shipping 20 of the most common icons with VS 2005. The Office team considers their icons to be an important part of their intellectual property so they won't let us ship the entire set.

Jim_MS (Expert):
Q: Jim: we would allready be happy with Office getting a similar solution like SQL2005 with .NET becoming first class citizen

A: VSTO offers pretty deep integration: you get Office projects in VS, and you also get Windows Forms in your Office documents, and you can use .NET Framework binding interfaces to bind to Excel data, for example.

Ed_H_MS (Moderator): This has been a great chat. Thank you to everyone for contributing. Unfortunately, it is time to go. Thanks for participating, and we'll see you next time!

Ed_H_MS (Moderator): The transcript from today's chat will be posted on http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/chats/recent.asp