StrataFrame Forum

Some questions about controls

http://forum.strataframe.net/Topic27836.aspx

By Thomas Holste - 8/5/2010

Hi there,

I am wondering if you can recommend controls for winform-development using VS2010/VB.Net and strataframe. I am looking for

1. A controls which handles resizing. I tried one (Resize by Larcom and young) but it did not work with strataframe forms. It should be able to do real resizing and not just anchoring and docking. It should not work in design mode but only when running and be able to exclude controls (maybe by using a tag-description). And it should just be dropped on my baseform and ready to run.

2. The appearance of the Datagridview is not satisfying me at all. When I use a DGV on an form and dimension it to display for example 10 rows but the underlying BO has less records it does not display "empty lines" like am used to from my VFP-Grids but an ugly dark background which irritates not only me but my customer to. I was looking for some hints to change this behavoiur but found all tips to complicated. So I was thinking about using the Strataframe Listview, but in some of my grids I need editing capabilites (not adding) and to get some constistency in my user-interface I want to use only one control.

Can anybody of you give me some recommendations what to do or what to use?

Thanks in Advance

Thomas

By Greg McGuffey - 8/5/2010

Thomas,



Welcome to the forums!



I'm sure others will provide their suggestions, but I'll offer a "big picture" view first.



For built in StrataFrame support, we provide wrappers for two control sets: Infragistics and DevX. Both are good controls and those who use them can provide more information about what they like/dislike about them.



However, you can use any other control set with StrataFrame, you'll just have to write the wrappers that implement IBusinessBindable to allow SF binding. It's not hard and we can provide help. BTW, if you do end up write wrappers for another control set, you might consider posting them in the user contributed sample area, so others can use them.



Most of component vendors also provide full featured grids, including Infragistics and DevExpress.



I've used ComponentOne controls and don't have any complaints (but I also haven't used them that extensively). I got their WinForms studio, mostly for spell checking as it works with another control I use, TxTextControl. I also really like there SuperLabel, which can easily display HTML formatted text, without a dependency on IE. ComponentOne also has a sizer control, that works like a WPF grid.
By Thomas Holste - 8/5/2010

Hi Greg,

thanks a lot for your answer. I am already looking at devexpress because the grid looks fine and their layout-control seems to handle resizing to. Component One is a bit too oversized for me as my aim is to use not too much 3rd-party-tools.

Before I started working with VFP in 1998 I did some projects with VB3/5 and used a lot of controls which suddenly (with new releases) started not to work together. So one thing I love(d) about VFP is, that I needed (even for a really big project I am developing since 10 years with VFP6/8/9) only a few tools for tasks that VFP could not handle.

Best regards

Thomas

By Greg McGuffey - 8/6/2010

Yeah, I was(am) not happy that ComponentOne forces you to buy not only the cow, but the entire farm....I only needed like two controls...actually, just one, the spell checker. Sigh.



You might also search the forum for "Infragistics" and "devexpress" to see what other have said. Of course pay attention to the date, as things can change a lot in a couple of years. There have been other specific control suggestions too, like to handle pdf, reporting, scanning, to handle network sockets, etc.