Blog - Articles and information on C# and .NET development topics • Cyotek

Creating long running Windows Forms applications without a start-up form

26 August 2013 Richard Moss c# | winforms | applicationcontext 11 comments Files

Sometimes you may wish to create an application that sits running in the background but doesn't actually display an initial user interface. However, the user can interact with the application and so therefore its not appropriate to be a service. Often such applications are accessible from a system tray icon. Another viable requirement might be for multiple top level windows, for example recent versions of Microsoft Word, where each document has its own application window.

By default however, a normal Windows Form application displays the start-up form which definitely isn't desirable, especially as hiding this form isn't as straightforward as you might expect. Fortunately however, the framework provides us with the ApplicationContext class that can be used by Application.Run.

This article describes how to use application contexts to create an application that initially has only a system tray icon to which further functionality can be accessed.

ImageBox 1.1.4.0 update

10 August 2013 Richard Moss c# | imagebox 18 comments Files

Update 1.1.4.0 of the ImageBox control is now available, with a large number of new features and bug fixes.

Using alternate descriptions for enumeration members

28 July 2013 Richard Moss c# | reflection | ComponentModel | enum 1 comment Files

Enums are useful language features. But what happens when you want to display a string version of an enum member rather than just casting the member to a string? You could manually create a switch statement for conversion, and periodically update such functions when extending the source enum. Or you could use the power of reflection and attributes to do it automatically.

Creating a custom TypeConverter part 2 - Instance descriptors, expandable properties and standard values

28 July 2013 Richard Moss c# | TypeConverter | ComponentModel | InstanceDescriptor 6 comments Files

This article describes extending a custom TypeConverter created previously to support better code generation, expandable properties, and dropdown lists containing standard values.

Creating a custom TypeConverter part 1 - getting started

28 July 2013 Richard Moss c# | TypeConverter | ComponentModel 3 comments Files

Type converters allow classes to be edited via designers such as the PropertyGrid. This article details how to create a simple type converter to and from a string for use with a PropertyGrid control.