Reasonable layout, gorgeous style, talk about the interface design of WinForm program

Reprinted, good study articles

After reading it, I didn't quite understand it at first, and after experimenting a few times I understood the power of Dev. Engaged in WinForm development for many years, due to the needs of the project, designed a variety of interface effects. In general, the use of traditional interface control elements, reasonable design layout, can design a more standard interface, the use of some skin-changing controls or parts of the interface components, can design a relatively good-looking interface, such as the previous popular Activeskin, Irisskin and Dotnetskin, which are able to skin the traditional interface elements, are actually much better looking than the standard gray interface controls. However, with the development of the components of the interface control, the current tendency is to use a larger group of controls, in addition to providing a well-designed interface control, but also provides a very wide range of colorful interface styles to choose from, such as DotNetBar, NetAdvantage, Large interface control groups such as DevExpress.

No matter how the interface design changes, the general principle is to provide customers with intuitive, easy-to-use, experience a better interface effect oh, from the development process of office We can also see the overall interface effect trend, from the beginning of the standard control to the current Ribbon form, from single-tone to colorful interface style, Provide us with a good interface design reference, large-scale interface components are also imitating this trend. So, let's talk a little bit more about what I'm going to do, and now I tend to adopt a ribbon-based interface and an interface design based on a traditional interface that combines Outlook style.

One, ribbon-based interface

The above interface style, is a comparison of the atmosphere, in line with the Office interface effect of the interface layout, by the different function blocks in different panels to display, is really concise, beautiful, this article does not repeat the advantages and disadvantages of the interface effect, we mainly focus on the following another interface effect.

Second, Outlook-based interface design

In fact, Outlook style is very early, can also be seen in many public control groups, if only the pursuit of part of the Outlook interface effect, rather than the overall scenario, then the CodeProject on the open source Outlook component, is estimated to be one of the best (HTTP/ Www.codeproject.com/Articles/43181/A-Serious-Outlook-Style-Navigation-Pane-Control). However, due to the overall effect of demand, but also to consider more control interface style consistency and aesthetics, so we are based on the DevExpress interface group to design such Outlook interface effect, will appear more beautiful and generous. The interface effect is shown below.

The above by putting a lot of relevant functional modules of a system into a tree to classify the display, for a more complex human resources management system or other complex functions of the system, is a more reasonable layout, and the Outlook toolbar can still be hidden up, Save the data display space on the right multi-document interface, so that the overall is more reasonable and beautiful. The right side of the layout, but also through the splitcontainer way to divide it into multiple modules, and then the customer would like which data display panel larger, drag a bit on it, so as not more data, resulting in poor layout of the situation. Below we will introduce how to achieve the above interface layout effect.

1. Create a form based on the DevExpress.XtraEditors.XtraForm base class. As shown in the following code

public partial class MainForm:DevExpress.XtraEditors.XtraForm    {public        mainform ()        {            InitializeComponent ();        }    }

2, in the interface design, in the DevExpress Toolbox navigation & Layout inside drag add a Barmanager control into the form, and delete the default toolbar tools, and add some menu items and status bar data. as shown below.

3, add Panelcontrol and Navbarcontrol, add some test function buttons.

Since we need to use the MDI multi-document interface effect, set the MainForm IsMdiContainer property to True first.

Then add a Panelcontrol, set its dock to the top layout, set a background picture for the control Contentimage (pre-designed with PS, save in PNG format), add a few small lable, set its picture and text.

Finally, drag a Navbarcontrol control into the interface, set its dock to the left layout, through the control's right-click menu, "Run Designer" into the design interface, the first to add some navbargroup and navbaritem items, The rough settings get the interface effect as shown below.

Note that in Navbarcontrol, the default is that no panel can add some special controls, such as trees, buttons, etc., by default only the Baritem object can be added to the entry. In order to add such a control to a navbargroup, you need to modify the properties of the Navbargroup, as shown below.

4. Add Dockmanager and Xtratabbedmdimanager controls to implement a multi-document layout, which will eventually be displayed in tab form.

Continue to add the Dockmanager control and the Xtratabbedmdimanager control in the form above, which can be implemented in the Right tab to show the multi-document layout, so that for user action, you can open more than one form at a time to operate, a lot easier, but also will be beautiful , is a common layout presentation. In order to activate the form at the top of the display of the Close button, the other is not displayed, then you need to set the Xtratabbedmdimanager control Closepagebuttonshowmode=inactivetabpageheader can be implemented. The final tab effect is shown below.

Above is I designed a system interface specific operating procedures, in fact, many times, the introduction is always very fast, groping is always very slow, this is the accumulation of knowledge efficiency. Of course, to design a system interface, in addition to consider the layout of the interface aesthetics, but also to consider the coordination of the icon, there is the overall framework, to be able to better adapt to the operation of these layout controls, not too bloated or difficult to read.

Reasonable layout, gorgeous style, talk about the interface design of WinForm program