New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Marnie Hutcheson
Contents
Create Animated Graphical Controls
From my first look at VG.net V2.4b by Prodige Software Corporation, it seemed like just another typical graphics add-on, but as I discovered what a potent tool it is for Visual Studio® .NET graphical interface development, I became more and more impressed. The VG.net Graphical Designer integrates into the Visual Studio .NET ToolBox to create graphical components for your Windows® Forms applications. You also get a special drawing toolbar for manipulating graphics shapes. The free VG.net runtime, Prodige.Drawing.dll, powers these vector-based graphics objects and their animations. You just redistribute it with your programs.
A VG.net Picture is a .NET-based class containing vector graphics Elements. You can create several types of gauges or buttons and reuse them in different Pictures that appear in Canvases in different Windows Forms. Since these are vector-based graphics, they paint fast and are never pixelated, no matter how close you zoom in. Which brings me to the next cool thing that you can do with VG.net without writing any code—zoom.
VG.net uses floating point coordinates and transformations that allow you to zoom in as you create your graphics so you can see every little detail. It even lets your user interface scale and translate at run time. You just set the docking property for the Canvas to "Fill" the form, then set the AutoSizePicture property to True, and presto, your picture and all its sub-pictures automatically rescale to fit the current window size, no matter how big or small it becomes. Even the text scales perfectly and stays smooth.
VG.net graphical Elements support true transparency. You can change the transparency property for fills (most impressively for gradients), strokes, and text dynamically with no unfortunate surprises.
Events bubble up from Elements to groups, to sub-pictures, and so on. Graphics properties and styles cascade down, so you have lots of flexibility to animate as you process events. Properties in Styles and Elements are combined during the display pass. You can set properties on the child that are different from the parent; the child properties override the properties on parents.
You can change the fill of each graphic by modifying its Fill property, but it is easier to use Styles because you can change the appearance of the graphics at run time by swapping Style references, which is great for animating mouseovers and click events. A Style defined at any Picture level in a hierarchy is available to all descendents. An Element several levels deep can use a Style by setting the Element Style property equal to the Style Name. VG.net Designer also lets you create server controls that will render your graphic objects into bitmap images on the fly for your Web applications.
The VG.net help file integrates with Visual Studio .NET help and there are lots of samples both on the Web site and in the samples folder that is included with the installation. Getting started is as simple as adding a new item to your project and selecting VG.net Picture from the Add New Item list.
Price: $550 per single-user license.
Create and Manage Icons
ArtIcons 4.15 by Aha-Soft is a Windows-based icon maker with features that let you create, import, and export great-looking icons, cursors, animated mouse cursors, and other small graphics. You can import existing icons (even from the Mac) and images in many formats. The drawing surface, the tools, and the preview pane are all conveniently located in the window.
The ArtIcons image pixel editor is stocked with some really nice tools and effects, like shadow, opacity, smoothness, negative, grayscale colorize, hue, saturation, and color replacement. I really liked drawing with the gradient fill. You can design multilayer icons either in standard or custom sizes with the color depth up to 16 million colors.
Once you have an icon, you can create an entire set of sizes and color depths in just a few mouse clicks (see the preview pane in the accompanying screen shot).
Price: $39.95 for professional single-user license.
Print Source Code in Color
VS.NETcodePrint 2003—Developer Suite by StarPrint makes your code the prettiest and most readable on the block. It lets you print Visual Basic®, C#, J#, and ASP.NET source code in color and export output to RTF, PDF, and HTML.
When you combine source code indention, line numbering, and lines that delimit language statement constructs with user-selectable color and font attributes, your code gets a lot more readable. This is great for maintenance and code reviews, too.
You can preview, print, and export a complete solution, selected projects, project items, namespaces, classes, modules, and procedures. You can customize just about everything—the font attributes and colors for comments, identifiers, keywords, line numbers, strings, procedure headings, table of contents, and page headers and footers.
The preview screens let you see the formatted source code with unlimited zooming, multi-page thumbnails, and side-by-side pages. You have control over page layout, including paper source, orientation, line spacing, borders, margins, headers, and footers. You can even print in multiple columns.
Price: $89 per single-user license.
Encrypt Your Data Securely
Private Disk 2.05 by Dekart creates encrypted partitions that show up as drive letters on your FDD, CD, CD/R, CD/RW, MO, MD, ZIP disks, flash drives, all types of flash memory cards, handhelds, and digital cameras. Files saved to these partitions are automatically encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption. You can work with this protected data on any computer without installing any additional software; Private Disk takes care of all the details.
You can manage multiple disks and work with your encrypted files in Windows Explorer. Private Disk 2.05 lets you launch specific programs automatically when the disk is mounted. And, in case you forget to lock your PC when you leave it, the disk will disconnect by itself if you leave it inactive for a predefined period of time. The disk can save and automatically restore network shares.
Price: $45 per single-user license.
The Bookshelf
Developing Business Intelligence Solutions Using Information Bridge and Visual Studio .NET by James Henry (BlueVision, 2005) introduces the Microsoft Information Bridge and walks you through the process of architecting, implementing, deploying, and securing Business Intelligence solutions. It's a must read for developers thinking about implementing an Information Bridge business solution.
Henry contends that a document should have live links to all the information the reader needs to make an informed decision. For example, if you receive a memo about a customer who is thinking about canceling their account, there could be a smart tag leading to their account number. When you click on it, you will see their latest metadata, which can include information like order history, payment history, customer summary, and so on.
Creating and linking to Web services that grab the data you want, defining the metadata and the actions that the users will be able to perform using the Visual Studio metadata designer plug-in, and programming the actions of the smart tags is an involved process. This book covers it all.
Price: $49.99, 376 pages.
All prices were confirmed at press time and are subject to change.
Send your New Stuff to newstuff@microsoft.com.
Marnie Hutcheson is president of Internet Development Associates (Ideva), a firm in Ocala, Florida, that specializes in Internet and intranet Web application design and development. She has published technical papers and books on various computing topics. You can reach her at
marnie@ideva.com.