Welcome to In Depth

A series of three in-depth articles which show how to create a totally custom collection object and a WPF control that databinds to it.

Finally, I'll show you how to customise that system to accept any objects you like and to create custom data templates to spice the control up.

Discover how to create a non graphical presentation layer which enables you to quickly remove one user interface and replace it with another, even on a completely different platform.

A scrollable zoomable canvas control suitable for creating drawing and object manipulation surfaces.

See how the old recursive flood fill algorithm gets new life using a .Net stack collection

A demo application which gives you how to make the event-driven apps more robust!

Add extended properties to your designer controls

Article describing GDI+ alpha-blending in .NET

Read on now to discover the right way to go about debugging complex controls at run time and design time.

Recently, Microsoft released DirectX9 which has a new set of managed wrappers that enable you to use DirectX through C# or VB.NET applications. Read on..

If you ever create applications in which the user has to edit items they have selected, such as graphical elements in a drawing package or objects in a list view, you'll probably have used the PropertyGrid control as a UI element to speed development of what would otherwise be a very complex task.

An article on text formatting in .NET

This is the first in a series of occasional articles that will create some handy shell-extension objects in managed code. Look out for more in future editions.

The classes and controls provided in Windows Forms are well suited to most applications.  There are however, a few situations when a non-standard window is required for which Windows Forms does not have an answer.  For example, a custom made tool-tip window is very difficult to create using the standard Windows Forms repertoire.

The property grid is one of the most useful controls when creating applications that need to provide a simple to use yet powerful method of editing any object model.

Windows has a certain look and feel but applications that need to have a very individual appearance can be created using GDI+ and some window region goodness.

The property grid is one of the most useful controls when creating applications that need to provide a simple to use yet powerful method of editing any object model.

Windows Forms controls provide a 3D or flat appearance as standard and the framework provides no other method of changing the appearance of controls and apparently do not enable users to customize their appearance other than through handling the Paint event and drawing directly on the control surface.

Graphics systems which maintain information about geometric shapes or graphical objects that maybe interacted with are known as retained-mode systems because they retain information about all the graphical objects in an object model.

When I originally embarked upon this article I imagined that the process of creating owner-drawn ListView derivatives in Windows Forms would be quite cut and dried. As the great Rabbie Burns once said "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

It's possible to create a cool and distinctive look using this method it has certain disadvantages.

One of the coolest things you can do with GDI+ is mess about with images. Image transition suites are big business with some packages selling for almost a thousand dollars.

Creating config files is a useful technique but you have to decide what to configure by hand. Using reflection, you can create configurations that can maintain application state very easily.

The property grid used at design time is a great tool but sometime it'd be great just to grab a little handle on a control to tweak a property that was wholly visual in nature.

Windows Forms applications regularly use the LayeredWindow API when translucent forms are used but the control over it is rudimentary only allowing you to set the opacity of a given window.

So many people seem to struggle over this simple functionality that I thought it would be a great idea to create a little base class that shoehorns snap to grid behavior into the mouse handling methods and events.

One of the most popular types of display is the old seven segment LED used for many years on video-recorders, watches and just about every other electronic gizmo that requires a numeric display.

An LED digital clock is one of the classic forms of time display. Using the LED control created earlier, you can put together a composite control that displays time very easily.

The LEDBar aggregates a number of LEDControl objects to make a display that can show any numeric information.

How we can use the simple gradient generating brushes to create alpha blend masks and make effects like the Windows Drag-Image .