Channel 9 Forums - The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:13:14 GMT

A little application that monitors the clipboard. It shows the clipboard history in a popup window and allows to put any entry back into the clipboard.

It contains a class that monitors the system clipboard: ClipboardMonitor. The class creates internally a NativeWindow that registers as clipboard viewer and processes the messages send by the system (if the content of the clipboard changed).

The app also tries to show a way to create a popup window (by processing a few windows messages) and to start an application in the system tray without showing the main window.

I have seen that the topic of starting an application displaying a notify icon in the system tray area is an often discussed topic in news groups... although the solution is quite simple.

Once the NotifyIcon control is placed on the form, you only need to instanciate the form. Once instanciated the NotifyIcon control shows the icon in the system tray. It is not required to show the form!
The application is then started without providing a form. That means that it can only be closed by calling Application.Exit() and not by closing the main form (there is no main form provided).

MainForm form = new MainForm();
Application.Run();

The sample shows also how to inherit from ListBox and create your own custom drawn listbox items. Each listbox item is custom drawn and has a button (visible on the right side of the item when selected). After clicking the button a context menu pops up. It contains actions that can be done on the listbox item.

As last nice feature the app has a class (AutoStarter) that registers or unregisters the application to start with the system. That is done by setting the appropriate keys in the registry.

I hope you enjoy my work.

Version 1.0.1:
- Showing now the icon of the application (if available) that put the item into the clipboard. As suggested by Ion.

Version 1.0.2:
- Fixed minor issues with putting an item back into clipboard.
- Added clear all link to main menu.
- Added limit of max. items in history.

Version 1.0.3:
- Fixed minor bugs.
- Enhanced UI.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Ion Todirel — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 15:02:15 GMT

Instead of using fixed icons (in ClipboardItemListBox ()) whould't be better to use Icon.ExtractAssociatedIcon (if it make sense)?

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:07:12 GMT

New version 1.0.2 is up.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 07:38:43 GMT

Version 1.0.3 is up.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Sven Groot — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:51:31 GMT

Very nice! I love the UI, very Vista-ish.

Two things I noticed:
1. You're overriding the WndProc to detect when the form loses focus? Any particular reason why you're not using the Deactivated event?
2. You're setting the font manually to Segoe UI, 9pt. Instead of doing that, I recommend setting it to SystemFonts.IconTitleFont (do this in the constructor after calling InitializeComponents, or do it in the Load event; the latter is required if you don't want to do it in DesignMode (which is what I do). This has the advantage of using Segoe UI on Vista, Tahoma on XP, and Sans Serif elsewhere, and it also obeys the user's font size settings.

I have a class that I use as the base class for most of my forms that does this for me:

///

/// Base class for windows forms that should follow the global font scheme settings.
///

///
/// This class makes sure the form uses Tahoma on XP and Segoe UI on Vista. Please make sure your
/// form's property is set to
/// Font, and make special provisions if your form uses graphics or anything like that.
///
public class AutoFontForm : Form
{
///

/// Creates a new instance of the class.
///

   public AutoFontForm()
   {
      this.Load += new EventHandler(AutoFontForm_Load);
   }

   void AutoFontForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
      if( !DesignMode )
      {
         Font = System.Drawing.SystemFonts.IconTitleFont;
         Microsoft.Win32.SystemEvents.UserPreferenceChanged += new Microsoft.Win32.UserPreferenceChangedEventHandler(SystemEvents_UserPreferenceChanged);
      }
   }

   void SystemEvents_UserPreferenceChanged(object sender, Microsoft.Win32.UserPreferenceChangedEventArgs e)
   {
      if( e.Category == Microsoft.Win32.UserPreferenceCategory.Window )
         Font = System.Drawing.SystemFonts.IconTitleFont;
   }
}

There's some issues with graphics since automatic scaling will also resize your pictureboxes if you have any, and you definitely need to test with all three fonts and different sizes (since MS Sans Serif, Tahoma and Segoe UI have wildly different font metrics), but other than that it works great.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 07:57:45 GMT

Hi Sven. Thanks for your feedback.

1) I override, since Deactivate is also fired if a messagebox shows up. That happens when clicking the "clear history" link. In that case the popup window disappears, which is not what i wanted... By overriding the window proc this doesn't happen

2) I'll fix that

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Sven Groot — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 20:20:34 GMT

littleguru wrote:

1) I override, since Deactivate is also fired if a messagebox shows up. That happens when clicking the "clear history" link. In that case the popup window disappears, which is not what i wanted... By overriding the window proc this doesn't happen

That makes sense. I find it's usually a good idea to document this kind of thing in your code with comments, if I don't I come back to it after six months and think "why the hell did I do that"? Also, it's better to use a named constant for the window message you're looking for rather than using a magic number in your code. Right now I have to search through the header files to find out which one it is.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm lecturing you, the Teaching Assistant in me tends to come out sometimes.

Other than that, as I've said, very nice app.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 16:41:05 GMT

I know, there are some places of improvement (documentation + using constants - and a lot other stuff to btw.)... but I haven't had the time and passion to do them

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

phreaks — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 06:55:15 GMT

Way cool.
Great job.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

anthq11 — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:11:58 GMT

thats awesome!

nice job

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Oggelito — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:19:39 GMT

Excellent work with the interface.
A clipboard manager is a must have, and this is the best I've seen so far.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

blowdart — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 14:26:33 GMT

Sweet.

But it kills RDPCLIP, no more cutting in a remote desktop window and pasting in the host machine

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:50:08 GMT

blowdart wrote:

Sweet.

But it kills RDPCLIP, no more cutting in a remote desktop window and pasting in the host machine

Strange. I register only the app in the notification queue and unregister it on exit.

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

harumscarum — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:43:38 GMT

Finally downloaded this and I am really liking it. Just a couple questions:

1) Why Chili?
2) When I click on the icon in the taskbar with the app open shouldn't it close it instead of reopening?

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:31:16 GMT

harumscarum wrote:

Finally downloaded this and I am really liking it. Just a couple questions:

1) Why Chili?
2) When I click on the icon in the taskbar with the app open shouldn't it close it instead of reopening?

Thanks for the feedback.

1) Because I needed a root namespace and came up with Chili. I know it's not very genial, but anyways... www.chilisoftware.net is now my "company"

2) This is the same as with the other popups in Vista (try with the volume, energy or network popup). If you click the icon they will also not get hidden!

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

N3mr0d — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:32:18 GMT

Hello!

Nice work, very useful. I was wondering if you thought if it would be possible to create a drag&drop on purpose to move data from and to other apps?

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

Christian Liensberger — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:32:53 GMT

N3mr0d wrote:

Hello!

Nice work, very useful. I was wondering if you thought if it would be possible to create a drag&drop on purpose to move data from and to other apps?

Cool that you like it

You mean from the clipboard history window to an app?

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

N3mr0d — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:31:37 GMT

Yes, text, bitmaps or other things... I assume that it should possible to do it with text, but with more complex objects? And why not in the two ways? from you clipboard manager to apps, and from apps to the clipboard?

I thought of that functionnality when I saw the demo of "surface" and this wondrous screen from perceptive pixel.

If I had more time, and more confidence in my skills in .net I would try to code it... Holliday soon .

I'll keep in touch if I am able to do it

The Sandbox - Chili Clipboard: An extended clipboard

MO — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:43:19 GMT

hi ...

i dont know if you still support this project, it is really cool, but i found a small bug ?

when i try to copy stuff from Firefox, it will be pasted twice (that means it will appear in the ist 2 times????)

do you know why ?

i would really be grateful if you help me to find the bug ..

thanks