wyDay blog

This is another easy tip to wrap up this series of articles.

Keyboard accessibility

Start your application and unplug your mouse. Can you navigate and use your application? If you hit the tab key does the next logical control get focused? Can you open the file menu by pressing Alt-F?

Set tab ordering

Simply set the TabIndex property of your controls in ascending starting with 0. This way when your users press the tab key they next focused control is the next control in the flow of your form.

Menu quick keys

To add quick key ability to your menus you just need to put an ampersand (&) before the letter that will be used for quick access. For example, instead of a menu item captioned File, caption it &File instead. Now your users can access that menu quickly by pressing Alt-F.

SystemStyle Buttons, Radio Buttons, and Checkboxes

In Windows Vista Microsoft changed the buttons, radio buttons, and checkboxes to have subtle animations. When you hover, check, and click these controls they all yield organic animations. But if you built your app using Windows Forms the subtle animations arent there.

To add these animations all you have to do is set the FlatStyle of these controls to System.

Windows UX Guide

Microsoft has assembled a great collection of guidelines for designing applications. Its filled with screenshot examples showing good & bad designs. Plus its surprising self deprecating some of their examples of bad design are screenshots taken directly from Microsoft apps.

You should skim the guide at least once and bookmark it for later.

7 Days of Windows 7

Thats it for the series. If you missed the earlier articles you can see the full list of articles in the series.

There are many Windows 7 controls already out there. Ive included the best open source .NET components available. If you have other great controls, add them to the comments.

For each control Ill list what versions of .NET it compiles for and what versions of Windows it will run on.

Windows Ribbon for Windows Forms

Arik Poznanski has a great series of posts about the ribbon control he wrote that wraps the Windows 7 API.

Download it now full source code & examples. Also, view his series of articles (9 of them as of today).
Works with: Windows Forms (.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5)
Windows Versions: Only Windows 7

Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework

This is a mammoth control collection that is the work of 3 people.

Here are the major features:

• Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
• Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers.
• Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects.
• Explorer Browser Control.
• Shell property system.
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls.
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs.
• Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs. (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
• Sensor Platform APIs
• Extended Linguistic Services APIs
• Power Management APIs
• Application Restart and Recovery APIs
• Network List Manager APIs
• Command Link control and System defined Shell icons.

Download it now full source code & examples.
Compiles with: Windows Forms (.NET 3.5) & Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
Windows Versions: Windows Vista & Windows 7

Windows 7 Progress Bar

Windows 7 Progress Bar is an open source progress bar component that allows you to add a progress bar to your program's taskbar button. In addition, you can control the different states of the progress bar (normal, error, and paused) for Vista & Windows 7.

Download it now full source code & examples.
Compiles with: Windows Forms (.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5)
Windows Versions: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

VistaMenu

VistaMenu is a menu component that allows you to add Windows 7 and Windows Vista-style menus with icons to your program. It's written in C# and works with all .NET languages.

Download it now full source code & examples.
Compiles with: Windows Forms (.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5)
Windows Versions: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

SplitButton

SplitButton is a button control with a region that shows a context menu when clicked. It's written in C# and works with all .NET languages.

Download it now full source code & examples.
Compiles with: Windows Forms (.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5)
Windows Versions: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

LinkLabel2

LinkLabel2 is a fixed version of the Windows.Forms LinkLabel control. It features the correct system "hand" cursor, and correct font rendering.

Download it now full source code & examples.
Compiles with: Windows Forms (.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5)
Windows Versions: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

7 Days of Windows 7

Join me tomorrow when I talk about Finishing touches: Make your .NET app shine with professionalism. See the full list of articles in the series.

One of the great things about Vista and Windows 7 is the user isolation. Even admin users need to elevate their account to make system changes. Take this Date and Time dialog from Windows 7 as an example:

Every user can view the Date and time, but only administrators can change it.

Adding this ability to your .NET application

Although this series of articles is called 7 days of Windows 7 this particular article is applicable to Windows 2000 Windows 7.

Step 1. Do we have permission?

The first step is to check if we can write to system registry or system files & folders. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest method is a simple Windows API call:

// check if user is an admin for Windows 2000 and above
[DllImport("shell32.dll", EntryPoint = "#680", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
public static extern bool IsUserAnAdmin();

This will return false if youre a limited user on Windows 2000 Windows 7, and will also return false if you are an admin but arent elevated on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

In other words, it will return false if you dont have permission to access system files & registry. And ' IsUserAnAdmin returns true if you do have permission.

Step 2. Notifying the user that elevation will happen: UAC Shield Icon

To set the shield icon to one of your buttons you have to do a few things. First, set the FlatStyle of your button to System:

Next, you need to define a couple of functions:

public static bool AtLeastVista()
{
    return (Environment.OSVersion.Platform == PlatformID.Win32NT && Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major >= 6);
}


[DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
public static extern IntPtr SendMessage(HandleRef hWnd, UInt32 Msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam);


public static void SetButtonShield(Button btn, bool showShield)
{
    //Note: make sure the button FlatStyle = FlatStyle.System
    // BCM_SETSHIELD = 0x0000160C
    SendMessage(new HandleRef(btn, btn.Handle), 0x160C, IntPtr.Zero, showShield ? new IntPtr(1) : IntPtr.Zero);
}

Now, simply use this snippet in your code:

// UAC Shield on next button for Windows Vista+
if (AtLeastVista())
    SetButtonShield(btnName, true);

Step 3. Re-launching process with administrator privileges

All we have to do now is show the elevation dialog and elevate the current program. You might want to specify some arguments, but the barebones of it is as follows:

ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo
                           {
                               Arguments = "-justelevated",
                               ErrorDialog = true,


                               // Handle is the handle for your form
                               ErrorDialogParentHandle = Handle,
                               FileName = Application.ExecutablePath,
                               Verb = "runas"
                           };
try
{
    Process.Start(psi);
    Close();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    // the process couldn't be started. This happens for 1 of 3 reasons:


    // 1. The user cancelled the UAC box
    // 2. The limited user tried to elevate to an Admin that has a blank password
    // 3. The limited user tries to elevate as a Guest account
    MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
}

Step 4. Code signing

Chances are that if you try to elevate your application youll get an ugly yellow elevation box:

To get the nice UAC box youll need to code sign your application. I wont link to any code signing providers (because the list is huge), but you can get a code signing certificate from anywhere between $100 for 3 years to $400 or $500 for a single year. It depends on the company you use and the amount of searching you want to do.

7 Days of Windows 7

Join me tomorrow when I talk about Every possible Windows Vista and Windows 7 .NET Control You could ever want. See the full list of articles in the series.