September 25, 2006

MozBar

MozBar
A flexible toolbar very much like the toolbar in FireFox Options dialog.

I started this project when I needed something like the toolbar in FireFox's Options dialog in one of my other projects. This is where the name came from. I looked around but couldn't find any control that had what I needed so I decided to write my own.

Another benefit of writing this control was that it gave me the opportunity to play around with some of the techniques used in control creation, i.e., Designers, TypeConverters and TypeEditors. I will not go into code details (that's what the source code is for) but I will try to mention a little about the techniques used.

I took a lot of hints from Matthew Hall's Themed Taskbar for general design and use of collections, and I also borrowed John O' Byrne's excellent Imagelistpopup control, modified it slightly and used it in my image dropdown editor.

XPTable - .NET ListView meets Java's JTable

XPTable - .NET ListView meets Java's JTable
A fully customisable ListView style control based on Java's JTable.

For a project I'm working on I needed a highly customized ListView - one that would allow checkboxes and images in any column, ComboBoxes and NumericUpDowns for editing and it had to be easy to swap data in and out. Anyone who has tried customizing a ListView knows how painful it can be trying to bend it to your will, so I decided to create one from scratch. Having come from a Java background I decided to base it somewhat loosely on Java's JTable.

SourceGrid - Open Source C# Grid Control

SourceGrid - Open Source C# Grid Control
SourceGrid is a free open source grid control. Supports virtual grid, custom cells and editors, advanced formatting options and many others features

SourceGrid is a Windows Forms control written entirely in C#, my goal is to create a simple but flexible grid to use in all of the cases in which it is necessary to visualize or to change a series of data in a table format. There are a lot of controls of this type available, but often are expensive, difficult to be customize or not compatible with. NET. The Microsoft DataGrid for me is too DataSet orientated and therefore results often complicated to use in the cases in which the source data isn't a DataSet and often is not enough customizable.

I want to thank Chirs Beckett, Anthony Berglas, Wayne Tanner, Ernesto Perales, Vadim Katsman, Jeffery Bell, Gmonkey, cmwalolo, Kenedy, zeromus, Darko Damjanovic, John Pierre and a lot of other persons who helped me with code, bugs report and with new ideas and suggestions.

This control is compiled with the Microsoft Framework. NET 1.1 and reference the assembly SourceLibrary.dll 1.2.0.0, this is a small library with common functionality. I introduced this dll in the ZIP file, but is possible to download the entire code and the last binary from the site http://www.devage.com/. For use SourceGrid is necessary have Visual Studio.NET 2003 or a compatible development environment.

The last version of this control is downloadable from site http://www.devage.com/. If you have problems, ideas or questions write me to webmaster@devage.com .

In this article I will want to supply a panoramic on the utilization and on the functionality of the control SourceGrid, for the details on the classes, properties or methods you can consult the documentation in CHM format or the example project in the ZIP file.