LeerTools: A suite of controls, dialogs and other useful methods

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Various screen shots

Introduction

After programming in BASIC, FORTRAN, Assembly, PLI, C, and then C++ for a combined 30+ years, I finally decided to check out the 21st century and write my first meaningful application in .Net. It was going to be a variation of an personal information manager that I had put out as shareware a number of years ago. At first I was enamored with the seemingly endless amount of classes, controls and documentation, and the ease at which one could quickly develop in this new environment. However, it did not take long to realize that there were many deficiencies in the way some of the controls operated, holes in the documentation, as well as outright bugs. As I developed my new application there were many times where I just wish something worked differently.

The first small annoyance was how the progress bar painted the bar in little separate boxes instead of a smooth continuous bar and didn't incorporate a percent complete indicator. Then there was the inability to change colors in the predefined dialogs such as the PrintPreviewDialog and others. Before long I began rolling my own versions of various controls so that I felt I had more control (no pun intended) over how they worked. And, of course, I would have the source code to fix problems and enhance the controls as I had done for years when the MFC source code was freely distributed.

One of the main areas I wanted to coordinate was simply to be able to pick a color scheme for all my controls and somehow everything in the application could easily use that color scheme. Then there were the many simple little things that I wanted that were just not available in the .Net controls, such as the ability to paint a picture in a frame but still get keystroke events (I use that in my LeerColorPicker to allow keystrokes to move the crosshairs around.) And then there was that nasty Interop thing that we needed to use in order to do things that just was not included in the first two iterations of the Framework. I wanted to write much of that stuff once so I wouldn't have to think about it again.

So what are LeerTools?

Simply put, they are a collection of controls, dialogs, methods and some Interop wrappers that worked the way I felt I needed to write the quality of application I hoped to create. And having been a user of some open source code in my career, I decided to give back to the development community and release this suite of tools. Although many of the controls are basically replacements for some things that are available in .Net, either using or just reviewing the code can prove to be useful in several ways:

1. Some of the controls offer features that are not available in the .Net equivalents.
2. Some of the controls just don't exist in .Net Framework.
3. Having the source code makes it easier to customize the controls to your liking.
4. The concept of the LeerSkin to have a consistent color scheme can certainly be broadened to provide a total look and feel across the controls.
5. Buried throughout may be interesting examples of how to do certain things and/or workaround known problems.
6. The collection of additional Methods may save some time in reinventing the wheel.

Note that most of the LeerTools controls do not inherit from the .Net counterparts. For the most part they inherit from very basic classes such as Control, UserControl and NativeWindow.

What is included in LeerTools?

Controls:

• LeerButton - A button control that adds features such as a detent style, separator style (for use in LeerControlBar), and an optional drop-down arrow to be used for displaying an additional context menu (similar to the Back button in Internet Explorer.)
• LeerContextMenu - My version of a context menu. All LeerTools menus are based on an ILeerMenu interface that can make it easy to design other parents for a set of menus. These context menus have several styles, and include an optional label appearing alongside a dropdown menu (a feature I had seen in some other CodeProject article.)
• LeerControlBar - This control provides what the MFC ControlBar did, but the .Net ToolBar> sorely left out. That is, it can be the container for any other type of control that fits within the boundaries of the bar, not just variations of a button. This is one of my favorite controls as none of the toolbars in my application are strictly buttons. A neat feature of this control is that it will optionally automatically create a dropdown list for button controls that can't be seen because the user has shrunk the window containing the control bar. In addition, the LeerControlBar supports a vertical orientation in addition to the standard horizonatal orientation. The LeerFilePicker uses the vertical form to display the "favorites" buttons.
• LeerExplorer - This control is actually derived from the .Net TreeView. It provides a standard tree view of the computer's file system, must the same as you would see in Windows Explorer program.
• LeerFolderCombo - A variation of LeerExplorer that presents a dropdownlist look at the shell's file system to facilitate selecting a folder. It performs like the folder drop down in the common file dialogs we all have come to love.
• LeerMenuBar - This is similar to the MainMenu .Net control. It does not, however, need to reside at the top of a form. It can be placed anywhere on a form and can be any width. Similar to the LeerControlBar, the LeerMenuBar can automatically create a dropdown to the right of the bar with menu items that cannot be seen when a form shrinks too small to show all the menu items.
• LeerPictureBox - A simple control designed to display an unscaled image in its center. I created this control so that I can get keyboard events from a control that is displaying a picture, which I could not get from a .Net PictureBox. I use this control, for example, in my LeerColorPicker.
• LeerProgressBar - A non-glamorous progress bar that shows a smooth bar (rather than a series of boxes), and allows a percent complete to be displayed as well.
• LeerSkin - A set of colors properties that can be used by all other LeerTools controls and dialogs. The Methods.PropogateSkin method lets a form propogate its skin to all compatible LeerTools controls that are contained within its boundaries.
• LeerTabBar - This control is like a TabControl but without the pages. It shows just the tabs so that you can have the functionality of tabs but not be limited to the metaphor of "one tab to one dialog (TabPage)."
• LeerTabControl - This is a more traditional tab control that consists of an underlying LeerTabBar where each tab is associated with a TabPage.

Dialogs:

• LeerCharacterPicker - The LeerCharacterPicker dialog allows you to select any character in the range range 32-255 from within any available system font. It is useful when you need to add a special character into a document and you do not know the character code or do not know how to enter the keystrokes to get that character.
• LeerColorPicker - The LeerColorPicker is a compact and powerful color selection dialog. Its crosshair color selector (one of three ways to select a color) is based on the Hue/Saturation/Brightless(or luminescence) presentation (see http://www.nebulus.org/tutorials/2d/photoshop/color/color2.html for a discussion of these terms.), which in my opinion, makes it possible to see a wider selection of colors making it quicker to get close to the color you wish to choose. It also has some nice features such as displaying basic and/or web-safe color wells for quick color picking, the ability to choose a web-safe color close to the custom color you have selected, and easy to use retention of custom colors selected, shows hex color values if you want to use those colors in HTML pages, and more.
• LeerFilePicker - LeerFilePicker is a replacement for the .Net OpenFileDialog using all LeerSoft components. It uses a LeerFolderCombo to select the folder, a vertically oriented LeerControlBar to display common locations a user might browse to, and a ListView to display the individual files. The LeerFilePicker contains most of the elements in the OpenFileDialog except some that are included as properties, but not implemented. The benefits of using the LeerFilePicker is that it's appearance can be controlled by a LeerSkin (the OpenFileDialog is closed and therefore you get what you get.)
• LeerFolderPicker - Presents a dialog that allows a user to select any shell folder. It is not the prettiest of the LeerTools, but gets the job done.
• LeerFontPicker - Displays a dialog from which you can select the following attributes of a font: name, style, size, strikeout/underline, text and background colors.
• LeerPrintPreviewDialog - Displays a print preview for a .Net PrintDocument. The main reason for the existence of this dialog is to be able to control the skin look and feel of the dialog, which cannot be done with the built in PrintPreviewDialog. Not to mention I wanted source so that I could choose to change its behavior.

Other goodies:

• A Methods class that contains a few dozen [hopefully] helpful routines, such as a routine to fetch the icon for a file from the shell, and a routine that displays a simple yes/no or ok/cancel type of message box but uses the LeerSkin for look and feel.
• A MultiMedia class that provides for playing and/or recording audio files. It currently will play almost any format, but the implementation provided only records wav or wma files. The MultiMedia class is based on the excellent BASS sound library from un4seen developments (http://www.un4seen.com), which is ONLY free to use for non-commercial purposes. They have various reasonable licensing prices for commercial packages, and their software contains and enormous amount of additional functionality that LeerTools does not expose. The MultiMedia class is actually an implementation of the LeerTools' IMultiMedia interface so that you can rewrite the class with any other library you may have should you need to use this in a commercial application. LeerTools only internally uses the MultiMedia class for playing a sound when a popup menu pops up.
• LeerTools contains wrappers for some of the frequently used interfaces, such as the IShellFolder interface used to get information about shell objects.
• LeerTools also has a large set of enumerations, structures and interop definitions for may Win32 functions.

Using the code

The best way to get started is to unzip the application, compile the solution (please use .Net Framework 1.1 as there are a few bugs that were fixed in 1.1 that I rely on), then add the LeerTools.dll to your VS design tools. If you like, you might create a new section for LeerTools to keep the new controls separate. The sample application is not pretty nor heavily commented, but does demonstrate a good deal of the functionality. The LeerTools source files, however, are extremely heavily commented and I have supplied a reasonably accurate LeerTools.chm documentation file created with NDOC.

Note: LeerTools was written entirely in C# on Windows XP Pro, and tested both in the included sample application as well as in a large scale application that makes moderately heavy use of all the controls. However, there has not been any formal beta testing. There is a lot of code, some of which is depends quite a bit on Windows messaging and it may take a few versions to get any kinks out. In addition, I do not know any reason why they would not be usable in Visual Basic.Net, but I do not use that language and therefore have not tested it. I welcome any feedback (good or bad), requests for changes/enhancements, bug fixes, bug reports or questions. Enjoy.

Known issues

The LeerFilePicker can be a little slow when filling the ListView with the contents of a folder that has a large number of files in it. It may be possible to speed it up if I tapped into the Indexing Service.

History

• Version 1.1 is the first version released to the public.

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Subject   Author  Date  Design Issues Jack Schitt 15:20 3 Jul '06   While reading your article about why you wrote LeerTools, I noticed something that troubled me a bit: The first small annoyance was how the progress bar painted the bar in little separate boxes instead of a smooth continuous bar and didn't incorporate a percent complete indicator. Then there was the inability to change colors in the predefined dialogs such as the PrintPreviewDialog and others. Both of these 'problems' stem from the fact tha windows allows the user to set the system colors and options for display in a program. I seem to recall a method of turning off the segmented progress bar that affects all programs centrally. Similarly, the user may have a preference for their own color scheme over yours. There may even be a very specific setup that the user requires so they can read the screen. Or there may be hardware issues that require the user to use a specific color scheme. My point is, the only time the programmer should choose what color something is is when they are choosing which system color to attach it to. This goes for owner drawn controls as well. (When I draw, for example, a 3d boarder, I use the Draw3DBorder method of the ControlPaint object versus drawing in light grey and dark grey.) Even though I could not get the sample to run due to a missing dll I have little time to track down and am unwilling to purchase a license for, I did still explore the project a little. One other troubling issue was the use of bitmaps for several font-based standard charachters. The check, option, menu subitem, minimize, maximise, close, dropdown, and various similar symbols are part of the Marlett family of fonts. The hrizontal chevron ( i.e. >> and << ) are part of any other font. For a vertical chevron, draw it at 90 or 270 degrees rotation. Why use a font instead? Combine with size for the button it's going on (retreived from the system setting) and the fontsize the user set (aka onscreen DPI) and you can draw them at any siz and resolution for extreemly sharp graphics. (Usefull for situations with a user who has a super high res monitor with a large font size (yes, it does happen). It prevents your bitmap buttons from showing up either unreasonably small or unreasonably blocky.) Until at least the missing dependancy is fixed, I won't be able to use your code in my project and will have to find a different control or roll my own. (I needed the File Explorer related controls) Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Design Issues leerjet 18:05 3 Jul '06   Although you have chosen to use a somewhat obscene name, I will respond for the benefit of anyone who reads your comments: 1. I am unaware of any global way to change the look and feel of MS progress bars. Even if there were, the need for a progress bar that can be enhanced to the programmer's delight, that already can draw smooth lines and include percentages, even incorporating changing the color of the percentage as the bar crosses, is clear. 2. The point of a toolkit is it gives the programmer the ability to set what color scheme[s] the user can use, whether it is based on system colors or not. All of my controls can use an optional "skin" object which specifies various colors to be used. If YOU choose to set the color items (such as menu foreground, background, select color, etc.) to system colors, your users will get what you say they want. 3. The "missing" .dll you refer to is free for non-commercial use, easy to find as I include the URL right in the article, and you can opt out of using it with a tiny bit of effort modifying the one class I mention. 4. Many of the graphical items you refer to can be set to images of your choice through member properties. 5. I happen to use large fonts on a high res screen and have tested on low-res with small fonts and see little issue with the images to be displayed. 6. The File Explorer controls I wrote were not perfect, and since I wanted to release my own application with almost flawless controls that mimicked Windows versions, I opted to purchase a license for Sky Software's excellent Explorer controls. In any case, my Explorer controls can be used, although they might require some tweaking to make them work the way you want. However, overriding any of the criticism is the fact that I have donated a whole library of .Net controls, heavily commented source and documentation included. If they don't suit your needs, then by all means look elsewhere. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Design Issues Jack Schitt 18:26 3 Jul '06   I didn't mean to come across as an ass. I do that sometimes though. I actually hadn't looked through the entire code yet and thought that the design of the skinning system prevented the user from editing the colors themselves. My bad. I think that your code itself is pretty good and if I can fix the issues I have with the code (minor issues, really) then I'll probably end up using it. I have about three different controls (including yours) I'm looking at to figure out which gives the best combo of functionality and ease of use and can be run through FXCop with a miniume of issues. Sorry for the misunderstanding, again, I didn't mean to attack you. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Design Issues leerjet 1:59 4 Jul '06   Thank you for your considered reply. It takes a lot to apologize in a public forum. With regards to the tools, I have not maintained the ones here once I went to a 3rd party set of Explorer controls which are not free. My current version of the tools includes a few fixes and a few additional featues. If you run into any issues that appear to be errors with what you have, you can write back and perhaps I can determine if I have already dealt with the problem. I exclusively use my current version of tools in the robust InfoWonder product that I offer free on my website (http://www.leersoft.com). Although no source will be given away on that product, you will be able to see more examples of how reasonably well the controls perform. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Win32 dependancy desmond5 6:44 3 Oct '04   The library extensevly uses Win32 API. I think if you already go dotNot way, you should try to minimize the dependacy of Win32 API. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Win32 dependancy leerjet 4:37 4 Oct '04   I agree with you that in the ideal world one could write a library using only the high level tools. However, since .Net is largely incomplete in its ability to provide low level access to code necessary to accomplish many of the tasks required by the components in my library, there was really no choice. Until such time as there is a .Net based operating system, as opposed to one that sits on top of our old familiar Win32 base, then there really is no choice. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink re Bass library dependency BillWoodruff 3:02 8 Sep '04   After fiddling around for fifteen minutes setting startup projects, I finally figured out there is a dependency on something called Bass library. You include a license file relating to this library I don't think including such 3rd. party libraries which must be paid for if using in future in commercial code is quite the CodeProject model. imho better you rip out the Bass library and let you work speak for itself. best, Bill Woodruff "The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote) Re: re Bass library dependency leerjet 9:35 14 Sep '04   Thank you for your input. I did discuss the dependency with the CodeProject staff before including it. They suggested that I include an easy way to remove its use, which I did by implementing the BASS support via an interface that can be replaced as required by a developer. Perhaps in the next release, should I find any serious errors or get requests for additions/changes, I will include two projects, one with the dependency and one without. Although I only use BASS for a simple sound played when a popup menu pops up, I thought it might be nice to offer the play/record file wrapper for those who are not necessarily writing commercial code, since sound can be a pain with .Net. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 2.00/5 (1 vote) LeerSoft&#65311;&#65311; lzqwj 23:44 1 Sep '04   why i don't find 'using LeerSoft.Tools' , System message to me ,don't find this spacename Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Libraries kuerbis 10:07 31 Aug '04   Hi Which classes are in Leer Tools from the Page http://www.un4seen.com or all? Thomas Bock Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Libraries leerjet 11:13 31 Aug '04   The only class in LeerTools that utilizes the BASS library which I obtained from http://www.un4seen.com is the MultiMedia class. The LeerTools MultiMedia class is a wrapper that exposes only the playback of a sound file or a recording of a sound file features from the BASS library. More accurately, my MultiMedia class is a wrapper for the BassLib2.net.dll wrapper (also from un4seen), since BASS.dll is not a .Net library. Furthermore, the only thing in LeerTools that needs the MultiMedia class are the menu classes, since they play a system sound when a popup menu pops up. If you don't care about the menu sound, you can strip out the code in the MultiMedia class or just implement your own IMultiMedia interface (that is the LeerTools interface that my MultiMedia class implements). As long as you return non-error return codes your implementation doesn't actually have to play any sounds! Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 2.00/5 (1 vote) Bass.dll? Furty 3:13 31 Aug '04   Seems your project has a dependency that has not been included in the distro. After about 15 minutes commenting out code I finally got it to compile, but it may be an idea to include the dependent library or at least a link to it. The blogless coder Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Bass.dll? leerjet 4:26 31 Aug '04   The bass.dll is in two places in the distribution: in the Tools\bin\Release folder as well as the ToolsBoxTest\bin\Release folder. If you are doing a debug version you will have to copy the bass.dll to the appropriate debug folder. Alternatively, you can download the latest bass.dll (which I did before packaging the distribution) at http://www.un4seen.com. Make sure you also move the BassLib2.Net.dll (the .Net wrapper for the bass.dll) and the basswma.dll (handles .wma format) into the folder where you want to run from. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink

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