Monodevelop: can't drag widgets - monodevelop

I am trying to use monodevelop. Just at the beginning I came across an issue:
I was following a tutorial on building a Gtk application (http://monodevelop.com/Stetic_GUI_Designer). I was trying to drag a button from the Widgets Palette. Nothing happened. I'd been trying quite a few times without any luck.
After a break I launched monodevelop again and I simply placed a button on the window of the application. After that I removed it, dragged VBox container, and placed menu bar on the window, according to the tutorial instructions. I was pleasantly surprised.
By the second try the same problem occurred - I was not able to drag any widgets. Dragging was beginning, there was a “+” sign at the cursor and then - nothing was happening. I cannot figure out what happened by the first time, what the difference was. Have anyone had a similar problem? Monodevelop looks promising, but I can't go on with it. (I tried placing 'Fixed' container on the window, with no result - I could not drag it.)
(monodevelop v. 2.4, ubuntu 11.04, Polish language.
I did look for an answer to my problem, without much luck, that is why I post this question. The problem is described quite precisely. There is a probability that others encountered the same issue.)

You need to drag a container on the form first before you can add widgets to it. The VBox container is an example of a place where you can put your widgets.
If you want to place widgets where ever you want you can use the Fixed container. If you want things to align you can use the VBox, HBox or Table containers. Placing in a widget in one of the fields will automatically adjust the size of this field to fit the widget you have dragged into it.
So basically,
Create a form
Drag a container on the form
Drag a widget inside the container.
These widgets are not to be confused with the custom made widgets (in your Solution browser, right click the folder User Interfaces and click Add Widget...). These are like forms. I use these to create GUI's in advance so I can call these while the program is running.
FYI: if you want to create code for a widget (like a button) you can't just double click it like in Visual Studio. You need to select it, the go to the properties pane, and change the tab from Properties to Signals. You can then double click the "signal" to create the event for which you want to create code. For a button this is usually the Clicked event (somewhere at the bottom of the list, you'll need to open the Button Signals)
You can always visit the IRC channel of Monodevelop on irc://irc.gimp.org/monodevelop (IRC.Gimp.org #monodevelop)
I also sit in this channel and can help with smaller problems and I also still use Monodevelop 2.4.

Related

Flex 4 (Air) - ShowDialog-like behavior

The ShowDialog function in VB.NET allows a child window (form) to be opened in front of another without letting the user interact with the parent window until the child is closed.
To see what I'm referring to (in Windows), open up notepad, click help > about, and then click back on the main window. You'll notice that the dialog flashes and makes a noise. That happens with dialogs in a great many applications, and that is what I'm trying to achieve.
I can't seem to find any way to replicate this in Flex 4 (Air) applications. Any suggestions?
EDIT 2
Based on your comment, you then have to create a new window component(mxml component with the functionality and interface you want defined in it) and can then attach it to the click event of the link/button on the main window. And for the focus issue you can use setFocus from IFocusManager component

Adding a interactive gui to my VB.net application

OK. So first, I will try my best to explain so good. My friend has gotten cursed out on this forum for not explaining, so I will explain. :)
Ok so I have my program built and all. But then it hit me! Wouldn't it be better to add a news feature? One teeny tiny problem? I cant? How would I implement a interactive code into an HTML page.
Like can i connect a button to a URL that will make the program do something. Almost like you can open cydia tweaks with there identifier and url EXAMPLE: http://handleopenurl.com/scheme/cydia And then i can add urls so i can update the program, without updating the files.
Or even just a featured news thing would be nice. But how would i implement this perfectly. I tryed a webrowser, but the page is too big for it. I am good at html, not much at css, i mostly use Adobe Muse http://www.adobe.com/Muse
Last question. Kinda defies the first thing i said about having my program finished.
Is there a way i can add a plus button and make it add more buttons and more labels and all?
This would help with allowing users to customize more then what the program can handle. By The Way, its a winter board Theme Maker. So I have a bunch of icons with there bundle identifiers and I create the folders with VB.net and all that stuff. But i want users to be able to click a plus button to add MORE text boxes and file browsers.
Any ideas? Maybe DIM 1 as NewFileBrowser? But i need to move all the buttons and i need it to be able to be clicked an infinity amount of times. I can do the coding for all of these buttons, but i jest need to know how to create them <1 Move them and the button so that the button goes further down each time, and more boxes will go further down. Much help apreciated. THANKS:)
EDIT:
Are you trying to say that you're wondering how to have a web browser control in a vb.net >app, which displays a web page, and when a button is clicked on the page, your app detects >it and does something? – Thraka
That sums up the top part. I am using windows forms, and it is coded in VB.net
If you get the object you want, like the button, you can hook the event and have it call code in your form.
Find the object using the Browser.Document.GetElementById method.
With that object, add an event handler to the Click event.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.htmlelementeventhandler(v=vs.110).aspx for information about the event handler used

WinRT AppBar changing on context (or ignoring right click)?

I am porting a Desktop WPF application to WinRT and I'm facing a little issue.
I had a ItemsControl and I had a context menu on every item to delete / edit the item.
I have been told that PopupMenu are not good in WinRT and I should use a AppBar.
I think I'm doing something wrong or I misunderstood that.
I thought that I could put that options on a AppBar and when I select an element, popup the bar and click where I need.
The problem is that the AppBar will show up when I right click on any part of my app, so that buttons will show up with an item selected.
So can I change the layout of the AppBar on different contexts (because it seems that Microsoft wants us to use AppBar as context menu without context capabilities) or only show it when I want via code?
Would be good to have a TopAppBar with some App-wide options and a BottomAppBar just for ListView's item context menu.
Or maybe I'm doing all this stuff wrong and I have to use another approach to put extra options on the Listview's items.
You are thinking about this correctly. AppBar is the place where you should put all your non-essential and selection based commands.
The guidelines here and here suggest that they should be arranged as follows:
Navigation commands should be in TopAppBar
Commands related to selection should on the left side of BottomAppBar
The rest of page specific commands should be on the right side of BottomAppBar
Contextual commands should only be shown when a relevant item to that command is selected. For that purpose you should set Visibility of these commands accordingly. Also AppBar should open automatically when an item with contextual commands in it is selected. You can do that programmatically by setting its IsOpen property. You should also set it to sticky mode by via IsSticky property.
If you're using MVVM you can bind your viewmodel properties to all Button and AppBar properties mentioned above.
There's a CustomAppBar control available in WinRT XAML Toolkit. I haven't used it myself yet but it has a couple of extra features that might prove useful in your case.

What is the best approach to building a popup inside of Flash AS3

I am trying to accomplish an "imagemap" in flash where you click on different areas in the image and when you click on it, a popup (within flash) comes up showing more information about the object that was clicked on. The popup has a close button that can will then close the popup.
My biggest trouble is the way I have my code right now is when you click on a region of the map, it creates a popup on the fly, and then I use addChild(_myPopup) to add it to the display list. The problem with this approach for me, is that the Popup is now a Child of the button I just pressed, but this object organization doesn't really make sense to me. I'd like to have the popup not be a child of the button and it be on it's own layer or a child of the stage directly.
What is a good approach and code architecture for building such an organization of objects? I'm fairly new to AS3 and I've built some small applications but my knowledge is limited.
Thanks
UPDATE
ok looks like calling stage.addChild(myPopup) from inside the button works pretty well. Is this good practice?
Assuming you have a hierarchy that looks something like this:
stage
Main class
Image class
Button
It's good practice to never call upwards in the displaylist, every object only deals with it's children. Events however, are a nice way of communicating upwards. Have the Button dispatch an event, preferrably a custom one, then handle that using a listener in the main class that then deals with creating a popup on top of everything.
An often encountered practise to organize the layers of the visible application is:
stage
main class with all children
popup container
tooltip container
mouse cursor container (apparently not longer necessary since player 10 supports custom cursors)
So you create your popups always in the popup container above the main class. If you would have tooltips, they should go into the tooltip container. This approach guarantees that popups are always visible above the main app and tooltips are always visible on top of everything.

PyGTK: Packing widgets before tabs in a gtk.Notebook

Basically, what I want to do is put some buttons before the tabs in a gtk.Notebook. I tried making my own notebook type widget and it worked well, but it would have required lots more work to make it as flexible as I would like, also it wasn't as efficient.
Here is a mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve: http://imagebin.ca/view/84SC0d.html
Any ideas would be much appreciated, thanks.
Ben.
You might be interested to know that this functionality has been added in GTK 2.20, see "Changes in GtkNotebook" in the following announcement: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2010-March/msg00132.html
It's a hack, but you can put your widgets on a separate tab, and then prevent the tab from being clicked by registering the following switch-page event for the notebook:
def onTabsSwitchPage(self, notebook, page_notUsableInPython, pageNumber):
# Don't allow to switch to the dummy tab containing widgets
if pageNumber == <put correct tab number here>:
notebook.stop_emission("switch-page")
Note that this doesn't look good with all GTK themes, but it works...
I don't think there's any way to do it without making your own notebook widget. There are a couple of hacks. One was posted by AndiDog. Another is to hide the tabs altogether (notebook.set_show_tabs(False)) and make a toolbar with buttons above the widget, with your buttons on the left, plus one button for each tab in the notebook that switches to that page.
Instead of making your own notebook-type widget from scratch, you could inherit from gtk.Notebook, overriding some of the methods like expose_event, size_request, and size_allocate, in order to deal with two types of container children: pages and buttons. I don't know how to do this in PyGTK though, only in C.
You might also consider whether the buttons in the tab space are really what you want. What if the user resizes your notebook small enough that some of the tabs disappear? Where do the previous tab/next tab arrows go? What happens to the buttons?