How to Customize Windows Desktop Application in MS Visual Studio 2005
Video Transcript
Now that we added our controls, let us customize them to make it more obvious. It is hard to tell by the default picture what this button actually does. Click on your back button. Scroll down to your properties window and select the image property. Go ahead and click on the ellipses button and again you will see the select resource dialog. Choose the import button and let us go ahead and import an image that best suits our back button. Let us go ahead and view back thumbnail and select the left arrow. Select Open click Okay. We will do the same thing for are forward button. Go ahead and select image, select the ellipses button, select import and we will select the right gift. Select Open, click Okay.
Now, take a look at this. The address bar looks a little bit small. We will need to expand this a bit further so that the user has enough room to type in an address. Click on the text box and we will go ahead and change the size from 100 to 300. Now, what happens?
If I look, my address bar has now disappeared. Instead, I see the overflow button indicating that my address bar no longer fits on my form. I want to go ahead and this behavior. What I can do is modify my icon so I no longer show text. Go ahead and click on the smart tag property and select Edit Items. I will go ahead and select all the button controls that I have available and modify all the properties at one time. I will go ahead and change the display style to simply image. And now, the user has plenty of room to enter a URL.
Let us examine the Setup Properties that makes a user experience even more rich. Click on your text box and scroll up to the Auto Complete Mode. As you can see, the default is none. We will go ahead and change that to suggest. Most likely, you have seen this functionality in internet explorer. You start typing a word and all the sudden the browser starts suggesting the completion of that word for you. This is exactly what you are programming here. The next thing I want to change is your Auto Complete Source. This is actually the source of data for the suggestion. If I want to, I can use the File System. I can use the Recently Used list or in this case, I am going to use all URLs. I will go ahead and select that.
The next thing I want to do is add another button so that when the user is finished typing their URL, they can select the go button to actually navigate to the page. So we will go ahead and add a button to your tool strip. Let us make this button a little special. Go to your images property. Select the ellipses button. Select import from your select resource dialog and let us take a look at the images we have available. You will see a red arrow, the forward gift. Open that one. You can see that this is an animated gift. The tool strip control also supports animated gifts. We will go ahead and select Okay.
Now that we added our controls, let us customize them to make it more obvious. It is hard to tell by the default picture what this button actually does. Click on your back button. Scroll down to your properties window and select the image property. Go ahead and click on...
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