ColorTextBox

• Download demo - 63.8 KB
• Download source - 129 KB

Introduction

ColorTextBox is a .NET 2.0 User Control which was written from scratch and is meant as a replacement for the TextBox control of the .NET class library.

Background

ColorTextBox is a by-product of LMX-Editor, an Open Source XML editor I developed as part of my diploma thesis. Since I was very disappointed by the performance of the RichTextBox control available in the .NET library (the standard TextBox does not support colored text), I decided to write my own ColorTextBox on which the aforementioned editor is based.

Using the code

Although ColorTextBox does not inherit from the abstract TextBoxBase class of the .NET library, it was designed to be compatible with the default TextBox implementation. So, if you're familiar with the usage of the standard TextBox, you can use ColorTextBox right away.

In fact, it should be no or little effort to replace TextBoxes in existing applications with instances of the ColorTextBox. If you develop under Visual Studio .NET 2005, you can use the Forms Designer to configure all relevant properties of the control.

Just look at the code provided in the example: it's a simple text editor which was built in about 30 minutes, and shows the most important features of the ColorTextBox.

Points of interest

As mentioned before, the ColorTextBox control is the base for an Open Source XML editor I wrote, which includes features like syntax highlighting and folding. If you want to write your own code editing component, have a look at the complete source code at SourceForge, which contains a generic CodeTextBox control which can be easily extended to support the mentioned features. Furthermore, the latest code for ColorTextBox will always be available under the link above!

History

03-08-07 Version 1.0.0:

• Initial release

• Added various keystroke shortcuts
• Support for arbitrary input chars

• Various bugfixes (Color support, Rendering, Scrolling, ...)
• Added support for additional shortcut keys (similar to TextPad)
• Added properties to improve compatability with the TextBox class
• Added new demo application to demonstrate the most important features
• Note: Some interfaces had to be changed!