Better ListView Sub-item Check Boxes

Better ListView 3.10.0 allows displaying fully interactive check boxes and even radio buttons in sub-item cells.

This feature can be activated simply by setting CheckBoxAppearance property of a given sub-item to other value than Hide. Such sub-item will not display check box or radio instead of image and text.

Please note the first sub-item’s properties do not apply as they are overriden by item’s properties. These two are separate for the case of column reordering (keeping consistency of sub-item states).

Another new feature in Better ListView is that check boxes or radios can be displayed disabled. This can be achieved by setting CheckEnabled property to false on the respective item or sub-item.

Sub-item check boxes can be operated by both mouse and keyboard. Checking sub-item with keyboard can be done by navigating focus rectangle by arrow keys to the given sub-item and pressing spacebar.

We have released a whole new WinForms component called Better Thumbnail Browser. This control is useful for anyone developing photo management software or any kind of image database:

Better Thumbnail Browser Overview

The control is capable of loading image thumbnails on background and does all the dirty job of threading and synchronization for you.

My motivation to make such component as lead developer at ComponentOwl.com was to have something that can smoothly integrate in my photo management software.

Since we already have Better ListView component, which is quite mature (three major releases over two years of development), I decided to build upon it and finally make control for image thumbnails that is both extensible and powerful and have native look and feel.

Better Thumbnail Browser inherits most of its functionality from Better ListView (multi column sorting, custom paddings and spacings, multi-line text and groups to name a few). It adds image loading logic on top of it, which can handle various scenarios:

• Load images from a folder, database or custom source automatically
• Load thumbnails with arbitrary sizes on background while progressively displaying them
• Handle zooming thumbnails on the fly
• Loading thumbnail items in multiple passes (e.g. load meta-data, then low quality image, then high quality image)
• Loading thumbnails in custom order
• Loading visible thumbnails first, then all other (and do this even though the user is scrolling the view)
• Manage updating individual thumbnails or their count on the fly
• Support showing loading progress

The component is fully customizable and by default inherits native Windows theme. We tested it on Windows 8 with success:

Better Thumbnail Browser with Windows 8 Theme

Better Thumbnail Browser contains default implementation for loading thumbnail images from disk. If you want to gather all images from a given folder (say “c:\images”), display them in Better Thumbnail Browser and load them on background, the code is particularly simple:

thumbnailBrowser.Path = "c:\\images";

And that’s it!

Better Thumbnail Browser will be our third component which is used in end-user consumer-level software package. This ensures future development, improvements and support.

Improved Performance

We put a considerable effort into optimizing Better ListView 2 to provide advanced features (e.g. hierarchical and multi-line items, collapsible groups) while still being swift and responsive.

The overall performance has greatly improved. Better ListView 2.1 can easily handle 10.000 items while still being very fast. The parts where improvements are best seen are:

Samples in both C# and Visual Basic

We added easy to understand samples for both C# and Visual Basic.

You can simply follow a link from start menu to open the Visual Studio project for your favourite language, and play with all the features of Better ListView.

C# and VB Samples projects in Solution Explorer

Extended Documentation

We added a Quick Start Tutorial to help you with setup, activation and integration of Better ListView in your projects, as well as many entirely new chapters in the documentation.

All code samples are from now on provided in both C# and Visual Basic to be easy to understand to both C# and VB.net developers.

Smoother migration from .NET ListView to Better ListView

Better ListView now contains all the constructor/method overloads and properties of the regular .NET ListView, so that for each member of .NET ListView there is an easily discoverable equivalent in Better ListView.

Item hierarchy with multi-line items in groups

Summary of what’s new:

We have added four new major features:

• Groups – items can be organized in collapsible groups
• Item Hierarchy – items can be organized in a tree structure, can be also collapsed just like the nodes in a TreeView
• Multi-Line Items – item texts can break in several lines and each item can have different size
• Data Binding – complex data binding is fully supported, any List, DataTable, DataView, array or any other IList-type object can be bound to Better ListView as a data source

Many existing features of Better ListView has been enhanced in favor of these. For example:

• Item reordering can be done with hierarchical items as well; user can even create child items
• It is possible to move items between different groups

Some of the minor features added are:

• Layouts can be adjustable – item sizes and spacings, even internal spacings
• Added new label editing controls (calendar and drop down box)
• Better ListView content (columns, items and groups) can be saved to file (XML or binary)
• Multi-line items support added
• See full changelog for details

We have also fixed many issues and improved performance of Thumbnails view and operations with collections.

About then new version

The new version 2.00 brings new major features, the most important one being item hierarchy support. This allows you to create tree-list structures in the list view, without having to sacrifice any of the list view functionality (columns, sorting, grouping, Drag and Drop reordering, etc).

Highly customizable item grouping capabilities were added. Individual group headers can have customized look and behavior. The group headers can be collapsible, support images, custom context menus, are focusable, and more.

Version 2.0 also improves the thumbnail view. The control handles larger images smoothly, even while resizing.

List items, group headers and column header can newly have custom padding specified for all of their elements, which makes it easy to do owner drawing of custom elements, such as overlay icons in the thumbnail view. Every part of the control can be newly replaced by custom drawing, not just overdrawn.

Version 2.0 newly allows you to save/load the list view contents with 1 just line of code, either in XML or binary format, to either file or string. Data-binding with custom column-mapping is supported as well.

Multi-line listview items are also newly supported. List items with very long text can take place of two (r more) regular items, so the text whole text is readable.

Thumbnails in groups

DataTable bound to Better ListView

Other news – new comics for developers!

We’ve also started publishing new webcomics for developers on our website, drawn by the Better ListView lead developer, Libor Tinka.

See what’s new in Better ListView 1.52.

Download the new version.

We are still working on the new major features (Item hierarchy, groups) as described here. These new features are near completion.

You can just Download Better ListView and install it over your current installation.

The changes include:

• New samples and new samples launcher!
• Added Thumbnails view
• Added support for image borders
• Extended owner-drawing capabilities
• Extended label editing capabilities
• Changed type of BetterListViewDrawColumnHeaderBackgroundEventArgs.ColumnHeaderBounds from Rectangle to BetterListViewColumnHeaderBounds (more options available)
• Fixed behaviour of layouts in special cases
• Fixed SelectedIndexChanged event raising before Better ListView state has changed
• Fixed light borders of downsampled images
• Fixed redraw bug when calling some of the RemoveRange() overrides
]]> http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-1-50-released/feed/ 0 http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-reviewed-at-devproconnections-com/ http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-reviewed-at-devproconnections-com/#respond Sat, 05 Feb 2011 13:51:20 +0000 http://www.componentowl.com/blog/?p=93 Our component got recently reviewed by Mike Riley. The review has a very positive tone. Here are some excerpts:

From the Better ListView review at DevProConnections.com:

In addition to creating a new ListView control to incorporate broader flexibility and functionality, Better ListView could also be called Fixed ListView, as it corrects a number of annoying problems with the standard ListView that Microsoft delivers to Visual Studio customers. For example, drag and drop and check boxes actually work they way one expects, and column headers and list sorting behave the way they do in the Windows Explorer and other native Windows OS applications. Likewise, improvements that go beyond the standard ListView, such as support for various image sizes and locations (in the column header or subitems, for example) further elevate Better ListView beyond Microsoft’s offering.

The review also states:

The control is very easy and intuitive to use and is well documented

The reviewer found the product obviously immensely helpful:

The enhancements I found most useful for my own projects were the automatic layout, context menus, improved drag and drop, item searching, and sorting options. Thanks to both the source code–included demos, the online documentation, and the obvious property names of the control’s “better” features, I was able to put the component to use faster than it took me to install the setup package.

The only negative thing mentioned in the review was our pricing:

Although I found using the control fast and intuitive, the one aspect that is a downer is the price. Considering that this is the era of .NET component bundles that offer hundreds of components, pricing this single .NET Windows Form control at the price ComponentOwl has is too high for my tastes.

Let me elaborate on that a bit. Although there are huge component packs for .NET, not a single one of them has a list view like our Better ListView. Most of the list view controls included in “packs” are simply not as powerful, which is only logical. Developers of these packs simply can’t focus their development just on the list view control that much, as they also have other 100 controls to develop and update.

However, the biggest drawback of list views that are part of a component packages is this: They usually implement their own class names and conventions, but what’s worse, their own custom look and behavior. These list view controls usually do not look and behave like native list view should. They can easily frustrate the user, right during the first few seconds of using them. I think that the first impression is important. So these controls are not easy drop-in replacements, but rather a whole different approach, which may be suited for some projects, but is IMHO inferior for standard Windows desktop applications, as compared to using controls that respect native look and behavior, like our Better ListView does.

Yes, we are perfectionists.

]]> http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-reviewed-at-devproconnections-com/feed/ 0 http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-released/ http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-released/#respond Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:34:43 +0000 http://www.componentowl.com/blog/?p=34 Welcome to our development blog!

After a year of hard work, development and testing, we’ve finally released Better ListView.

You can learn all about it (screenshots, comparison table, download) at Better ListView page.

This blog will feature not just posts about new releases, but also various useful .NET and programming related topics in general. We are currently busy with the product launch, but interesting posts are coming soon – definitely stay tuned!

Shall you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

]]> http://www.componentowl.com/blog/better-listview-released/feed/ 0