Joe Stegman - Building Outlook UI in 100 lines of code with Winforms
- Posted: Sep 09, 2004 at 6:27 PM
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Joe Stegman, lead program manager on the WinForms team (.NET client) has one of the more impressive demos we've seen.
Check this out. You can build a clone of Outlook in 100 lines of code (using the next version of Visual Studio and Windows Forms).
For the significance of this we need to take you back to the early 1990s back before we first saw Visual Basic. It used to take 400 lines of C code just to draw a Window on the screen back then.
The Windows Forms website has more demos and samples. Don't miss the first part of Joe's demo where he shows off other Windows Forms-based applications including an app that looks very close to MSN Messenger but is actually built completely in .NET.
Check this out. You can build a clone of Outlook in 100 lines of code (using the next version of Visual Studio and Windows Forms).
For the significance of this we need to take you back to the early 1990s back before we first saw Visual Basic. It used to take 400 lines of C code just to draw a Window on the screen back then.
The Windows Forms website has more demos and samples. Don't miss the first part of Joe's demo where he shows off other Windows Forms-based applications including an app that looks very close to MSN Messenger but is actually built completely in .NET.
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Thanks.
Chris Pratley of OneNote is signed up for a demo in the future.
Again, this is cool. We need sampled code......
I'm currently using SandBar and SandDock from divil.co.uk, but I'd rather have WinForms supply the same controls as WTL does.
I'd argue that the 2003 version has a nicer interface, but I'm biased (and this screenshot is just one dialog of three.) Besides, the Type Key stuff allows you to try and remap keys that might not be on the 2003 version of the on-screen keyboard, like media keys and the like. Just an alternate approach
Otherwise, you could also edit the Registry directly - for me, it was more about exposing the Windows functionality (and avoid physically popping off the cAPS lOCK key from my keyboards.)
Besides being very costly (consider displacing several other features) docking windows requests are more varied than you might think. We did get a lot of feedback to support docking windows, but we also got feedback (primarily from line of business developers) that docking windows were complicated, hard to support (user), and most users just wanted the look rather than full docking window functionality.
With the combinations of SplitContainers and the drag-to-dock ToolStrip stuff, we felt like the lion's share of the advanced UI needs were addressed.
Surely if Tim Dawson can develop something as neat as SandDock in his spare time, someone on the SWF team could throw something equivalent together?
>docking windows requests are more varied than you might think.
Surely that's not a reason to leave them out altogether - just make them more flexible!
--william stacey, mvp
Michael.
Thanks!
This article on Codeproject dicusses several ways to achieve docking windows. Even in Winforms/Framework 1.1. So it IS possible. Although rather complex.
I can't find the sample on windowsforms. Have I overlooked it?
Thanks,
Peter
When you do post it, maybe post in parallel with a new Channel9 video talking more detail stuff with the controls, treeview, patterns, etc. Cheers
--
William, MVP
You know Soon(tm) is trademarked allready by MatroxUsers and we all know about the impact of that word;-)
Ok, looking forward to it Soon(tm).
Have a nice weekend,
Peter
I find this all to familiar; Mark Boulter promised the source code to a sample Smart Client app in a previous .NET show and it never surfaced. Kinda ironic, seeing as how he is on the WindowsForms.NET home page
JT
we have a challenge that we should drag that MSN Clone he made and drop it in the Outlook and let it dock there...
any hints please ?
Has anyone been able to make the Outlook Clone UI work under Beta 2?
I'm about to start. Also, what is "OLAF"?
Michael.
Re: OLAF
As I watch the VS 2005 demo, OLAF appears to be the name of the solution.
OLAF = "Outlook Look And Feel"
The 2 key changes are to comment out the offending ComponentModel using statment and change IPropertyChange to INotifyPropertyChanged.
On recompiling, you get about 15 errors and 213 warnings. Focus on the errors (sort by Category in the Error list). I brute force fixed most of the errors by commenting out any property initialization for properties that no longer exist in Beta 2. For the InterfaceType errors, it's a simple rename to NetworkInterface* (check intellisense).
I may have broke a bunch of UI events, etc. but the app does run and display the main window.
The 213 errors are about deprecated features from Beta 1 to Beta 2. I'm not going to touch these (and didn't need to to get the UI to display). Most appear to be in the mail message/store code ...so if you just want the Office/Outlook UI and don't need the mail/message/store implementation, dump it first and then see what kinds of warnings remain.
Is there VB.Net version for this code?
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