General GUI question

[El Presidente]

I like the look and feel of the Microsoft AntiSpyWare applicaiton. I could
envision this look and feel for a project I am currently working on. Can I
do this with Visual Studio.NET 2003? Are there any sample projects
(preferably C#) that has this GUI interface I could play with. Thanks for
any input.

[Elp]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 07:51:03 -0800, El Presidente wrote:

I like the look and feel of the Microsoft AntiSpyWare applicaiton. I could
envision this look and feel for a project I am currently working on. Can I
do this with Visual Studio.NET 2003? Are there any sample projects
(preferably C#) that has this GUI interface I could play with. Thanks for
any input.

It looks like that they have implemented quite a few of the controls they
use in their application by hand instead of using the standard Windows
controls. They have their own menu control (that also contains the banner
below the menu itself and the navigation icons on the right), a custom
panel control with rounded corners, some custom buttons... If you have no
experience in custom controls development and GDI+, it's probably be going
to take you quite a lot of time to do it yourself. However, there is
nothing i can see that looks really complicated (apart from the menu
maybe).

For some examples of applications with nice looking custom controls (but
not really similar to the microsoft anti-spyware), download and try:
- FotoVision (VB .NET):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclien...es/fotovision/
- TaskVision (C# and VB .NET):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclien...n/default.aspx
- IssueVision (C# and VB .NET):
http://www.windowsforms.net/Applicat...=40&tabindex=9

Note however that with just the controls you can find in the VS toolbox and
a bit of imagination you can already do some nice looking stuff. And if you
add some of the custom controls that you can find on the code project web
site (www.codeproject.com) or in the Dacris NetXP library
(http://www.dacris.com/netxp/, free for personnal use and use in freeware
applications), you maybe won't have to do any coding to have something
really great.

[thowle]

I don't think thats custom menu control, but rather a label or something with
a contextmenu assigned to it.

As far as the buttons, I would make 3 types of images following the same
style, a normal, hover, and pushed style.

make those files embedded within the projects, and gather them through the
assembly into a bitmap object.

Add a panel, with a label inside. Make the panel background set to
"Button_0". On mousehover event, or mouse enter, make it change to
"Button_1", etc.

You get the idea.

I made a GUI based off of the GiANT AntiSpyware (MS AntiSpyware)
application, and it turned our perfect :)

"Elp" wrote:

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 07:51:03 -0800, El Presidente wrote:

I like the look and feel of the Microsoft AntiSpyWare applicaiton. I could
envision this look and feel for a project I am currently working on. Can I
do this with Visual Studio.NET 2003? Are there any sample projects
(preferably C#) that has this GUI interface I could play with. Thanks for
any input.

It looks like that they have implemented quite a few of the controls they
use in their application by hand instead of using the standard Windows
controls. They have their own menu control (that also contains the banner
below the menu itself and the navigation icons on the right), a custom
panel control with rounded corners, some custom buttons... If you have no
experience in custom controls development and GDI+, it's probably be going
to take you quite a lot of time to do it yourself. However, there is
nothing i can see that looks really complicated (apart from the menu
maybe).

For some examples of applications with nice looking custom controls (but
not really similar to the microsoft anti-spyware), download and try:
- FotoVision (VB .NET):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclien...es/fotovision/
- TaskVision (C# and VB .NET):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclien...n/default.aspx
- IssueVision (C# and VB .NET):
http://www.windowsforms.net/Applicat...=40&tabindex=9

Note however that with just the controls you can find in the VS toolbox and
a bit of imagination you can already do some nice looking stuff. And if you
add some of the custom controls that you can find on the code project web
site (www.codeproject.com) or in the Dacris NetXP library
(http://www.dacris.com/netxp/, free for personnal use and use in freeware
applications), you maybe won't have to do any coding to have something
really great.