VG.net Discussion

I haven't looked at your product recently (got stuck on server development), so it may already be there, but adding shapes/pictures that look and behave like Windows Common Controls would greatly improve the business value of your product. You may think it strange that I would ask for UI Elements that are already available for free with windows, but the Common Controls are very slow, almost impossible to extend, and not particularly composable. If you use Spy++ to examine some of Microsoft's own applications you'll see that many controls that look like common controls are if fact custom controls.

Perhaps a library of these common controls should be made as an example so that developers like me can save time creating them, but also tweak them if needed.

Yes, this is in our plans. You are exactly correct.

We have to spend less time on the engine and more on things built on top. The layout enhancments coming will help greatly. We have already started sliders and gauges.

So the first step will be to create some base classes that have no graphical content whatsoever, but establish a common API for Button, Slider, Scrollbar, etc features. Perhaps we should start a forum on this.

One problem currently is a text editor that does not use a windows forms control. Anyone with experience in this area knows it is much more difficult than it looks, once you start adding the commonly expected features (selection by mouse, scrolling, etc).

I was just wondering if this is still being pursued. I have come across a situation where it would be nice to populate a rectangle with an unknown amount or dynamic list of items from a database and assign an index to each item and have a vertical scroll bar to scroll through the items...much like a listbox or combo box.

Using the ClipRectangle property you can clip a SubPicture contents. Within the SubPicture then you can apply a Translation to scroll up and down. This is how the DesignerSurface works.