VS.NET Hacks

I'm learning Visual Studio .NET, mostly C# programming and Windows Forms. The ability to write pretty UIs for my Windows box in a language that looks like Java makes me happy. So far I'm pretty impressed with Windows Forms. The main drawback is how little open source example code there is. So I'm trying to put my work online. All apps require the .NET Framework installed. All packages include a full Visual Studio Solution as well as a prebuilt .exe.

Circles

A little graphics hack, only useful as an exercise. The salient things about it are it's in C#, does double-buffered graphics, does animation via a Timer, and includes some NUnit tests. You can download the code.

Circles2

Version 2 of circles. This one manipulates the Windows interface. No title bar, but movable and closable. Has a context menu. And if you drag the window the right, it'll snap to a grid and "dock" on the right side of your screen. The goal here is to look like a WindowMaker Dockapp. You can download the code.

DockApp Framework

I turned the Circles programs into a reasonable framework for building little DockApps. The windows more cleanly integrate into desktop, and there's a good base class for building these things. Three examples, too - a simple text diplay, a dockapp that displays whatever text is sent to it on a TCP socket, and a slowly animating colour box. Next up - persistent state for where the dockapps live. Some day I may even have to build a manager object. As always, you can download the code.

Nelson Minar Created: September 21, 2002
<nelson@monkey.org> Updated: September 24, 2002