DotNet programming, Custom Controls and Components for .Net and Visual Studio .Net
Your one stop shop for all your .Net programming needs.

.Net Links

Partners

How Olvio IT can help you become more productive

Olvio IT Inc. employs highly experienced IT professionals who went from the assembly language many years ago, through the Turbo Pascal and C era, to become today's valuable .Net programmers. Olvio IT focuses on producing high quality custom controls and components for the Microsoft .Net Framework and Visual Studio .Net.

With a large diversity of controls and components as well as extremely useful tools, Olvio IT will help you, as a developer, save time and money and be able to focus on the architecture of your application rather then on small details.

The PlusSuite Control Library is a state of the art complete suite of controls to be used in Windows Forms applications.:

Fully integrated with Visual Studio 2003
100% managed code (C#)
Complete documentation (on the web, local help files and Visual Studio integrated help, including dynamic help)
Comprehensive code samples
Strong component model
Advanced GDI+ graphics
High extensibility
Flexibility of all classes
Simplicity and easiness in deployment
Simple licensing scheme
Lowest price on the market for this value
Easy inheritance for all our custom controls and components.
The license scheme allows you to create royalty free user controls or custom controls.

Take the PlusSuite Tour to check out all these great features.

Besides these, PlusSuite comes packed with a lot of classes that you can use to create your own custom control libraries, taking advantage of the reusable code:

VisualStyle Class :: A Class that encapsulates all visual graphical style elements needed to render a control. Using the visual style will allow you to develop new controls fast, easy and with a professional look.
DropDownBase Class :: A class that allows you to create virtually any kind of drop-down control. The architecture of this base class breaks the drop-down control in 2 distinct parts: the visible control and the drop-down container. The container can hold any .Net control, thus offering a powerful flexibility.
Windows XP Theme render :: You can use the internal Windows XP theme render routines to create your own Windows XP look and feel controls.

Microsoft .Net

Microsoft® .NET is a vision and set of Microsoft software technologies for connecting information, people, systems, and devices. It enables a high level of software integration through the use of XML Web services—small, discrete, building-block applications that connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over the Internet. Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework allow developers to develop XML Web services quickly and integrate them easily with other applications.

Windows Forms

Windows® Forms is the new platform for Microsoft® Windows application development, based on the .NET Framework. This framework provides a clear, object-oriented, extensible set of classes that enable you to develop rich Windows applications. Additionally, Windows Forms can act as the local user interface in a multi-tier distributed solution.

Within a Windows Forms project, the form is the primary vehicle for user interaction. By combining different sets of controls and writing code, you can elicit information from the user and respond to it, work with existing stores of data, and query and write back to the file system and registry on the user's local computer.

ASP.NET

Microsoft® ASP.NET is a set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework for building Web applications and XML Web services. ASP.NET pages execute on the server and generate markup such as HTML, WML, or XML that is sent to a desktop or mobile browser. ASP.NET pages use a compiled, event-driven programming model that improves performance and enables the separation of application logic and user interface. ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET XML Web services files contain server-side logic (as opposed to client-side logic) written in Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET, Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET, or any Microsoft®.NET Framework-compatible language.

ADO.NET

ADO.NET is a set of classes that expose data access services to the .NET programmer. ADO.NET provides functionality to developers writing managed code similar to the functionality provided to native COM developers by ADO. ADO.NET provides consistent access to data sources such as Microsoft® SQL Server™, as well as data sources exposed through OLE DB and XML. Data-sharing consumer applications can use ADO.NET to connect to these data sources and retrieve, manipulate, and update data.

ADO.NET provides a rich set of components for creating distributed, data-sharing applications. It is an integral part of the .NET Framework, providing access to relational data, XML, and application data. ADO.NET supports a variety of development needs, including the creation of front-end database clients and middle-tier business objects used by applications, tools, languages, or Internet browsers.

Custom Controls

Introduction

One of the biggest selling points of Microsoft® .Net Framework has always been its support for components, allowing third parties to develop visual controls (and eventually, non-visual components) that provided new functionality to the Visual Basic developer. This aspect of Visual Basic development led to the availability of a huge number of controls—both shareware/freeware and from third-party development shops. Eventually, new visual and non-visual components could even be developed directly in Visual Basic, allowing for the development of an even larger number of controls, many of which where created by programmers (and programming teams) for their own use.

In the world of .NET development, the need for custom UI components is still present, but the mechanisms for creating these components have changed. In this article, I will discuss why you would want to create Microsoft Windows® controls, how control development has changed from Visual Basic 5.0 and version 6.0, and I will introduce four samples (each covered in its own article) of control development.

How Inheritance Has Changed Control Development

Control development in .NET is very different than it was in Visual Basic 6.0, and a large part of that difference is due to the availability of inheritance in .NET. Using Visual Basic 6.0, you were essentially limited to doing your own drawing and/or using a combination of other controls to create the desired functionality. If you wished to create the custom text entry box described earlier in this article, then you would create a new ActiveX control that contained a TextBox within it.

Note This process is often referred to as containment and delegation, and is actually used in non-control classes in Visual Basic 6.0 as well when you want to simulate inheritance.

Your new control wouldn't have any of the expected properties of a TextBox (such as a Text property) unless you added them yourself, and you would even have to add code to ensure that the TextBox took up the entire area of the user control and to handle resizing. You could certainly accomplish your goal, and with the help of the ActiveX Control Interface Wizard (a Visual Basic 6.0 add-in, see Figure 1), it wasn't that difficult of a task, but to accomplish the same result in .NET you follow a completely different process.