Volume 1, Issue 4

November 2003.

Feeling justified?

This month sees the beginning of another series article in which you will discover how to format text using GDI+. The ultimate goal is to create a control capable of displaying fully justified text in neat columns. The first part introduces the basics of typography and explores the methods available to GDI+ programmers for measuring and placing text.

Get your head around typography with the TextFormatter project.

Text displayed using the TextFormatter control.

 

 This article is sponsored by:

The shell game.

Great COM interop makes .NET the perfect choice for writing shell extensions that enhance the users experience. The first of this month's feature articles explains how to create a thumbnail generator for Windows Forms applications that enable you to show a thumbnail of the contents of your custom files in Explorer. To demonstrate,  a simple Windows Forms graphics application saves a file with a coloured shape in. These files are previewed in Explorer by generating the thumbnail image on-the-fly.

The .WFF (Well Formed Files) are previewed by Explorer.

Just a tip

Can Windows Forms be too complex for some simple operations? Well, use Native-Windows instead! The final feature article this month shows you how to use the NativeWindow class to create a simple yet effective tool-tip control that enables you to store a custom tooltip for every control.

Every button has a different style of tooltip.

As always, the controls created in Well Formed comes with a royalty free commercial use license so you can use them in your own applications.

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Check out what you missed in August, September and October