Hi,
How many fully functional built-in styles does the licencied copy of "AppStylist" for Winforms comes with? I noticed that there are 19 styles with the downloaded trial version. Does the licenced "AppStylist" for winforms offer more that 19 styles?
AppStylist is not styling the inbox controls along with the infragistics controls even after adding the "InboxControlStyler". The form back color still stays GREY and inbox controls looks same. So, if we already have an application built with inbox controls and wants to style, do we need to replace all the controls with infragistics controls in the entire application? Isn't it tedious and combursome to do that kind of changes? Infact the application has to go through more testing than just regression test for the appearance.
By the way, do you have any tool that does replacing the inbox control with the equivalent infragistics control? Going through every designer file manually to replace the inbox control with infragistics control will be a tedious task.
Eventhough AppStylist give options to set colors for the inbox controls, but the consumer expects to have the styles work right away without having to spend a whole lot of time figuring out the matching color schemes for the inbox controls.
I did not see any infragistics control for a panel (like UltraPanel). Am I missing something?
Thanks
Sivaram
Civaram said:How many fully functional built-in styles does the licencied copy of "AppStylist" for Winforms comes with? I noticed that there are 19 styles with the downloaded trial version. Does the licenced "AppStylist" for winforms offer more that 19 styles?
I'm pretty sure the trial version comes with everything the full version does.
Civaram said:AppStylist is not styling the inbox controls along with the infragistics controls even after adding the "InboxControlStyler". The form back color still stays GREY and inbox controls looks same. So, if we already have an application built with inbox controls and wants to style, do we need to replace all the controls with infragistics controls in the entire application? Isn't it tedious and combursome to do that kind of changes? Infact the application has to go through more testing than just regression test for the appearance.
The AppStylist will style inbox controls like forms as long as there is an InboxControlStyle on the form. If it's not working, then either something is wrong in your application or the isl file you are using just doesn't do any styling for the controls you are using.
Civaram said:By the way, do you have any tool that does replacing the inbox control with the equivalent infragistics control? Going through every designer file manually to replace the inbox control with infragistics control will be a tedious task.
No, there's no automatic tool for this. But mostly, it's simply a matter of Find/Replace to replace the type of one control with another. For example, you could do a find/replace on your application and replace System.Forms.Windows.TextBox with Infragistics.Win.UltraWinEditors.UltraTextEditor. You might have to fix up some code after that, of couse - the controls are not always 100% compatible.
Civaram said:I did not see any infragistics control for a panel (like UltraPanel). Am I missing something?
The closest thing to a panel would be UltraGroupBox.
I like infragisitic controls but Infragistics should have made even better with styling the controls including the inbox controls. Atleast what I understood is that "AppStylist" can't be used from out of the box for an existing application (just like DotNetSkins, IrisSkin. However those products has their own issues and I would not choose).
Just to let you know that my intension is not to be negitive.
1. Out of 19, most of the styles seems to have similar visual appearance and does not show much difference. They are really not that appealing. I expected a lot that "AppStylist" would provide a stunning experience/appearance.
2. I put together a sample application to demonstrate the differences in styling the inbox vs infragistics controls. But I did not see a way to attach the zip file.
3. Panel have its own advantage of having AutoScroll and "UltraGroupBox" is really not a substitute to that. Well, we can have UltraGroupBox dock to the panel to see the styles, but it would be an unnecessay control sitting on the panel just to achieve the styles. Same with UserControls on the form and the backcolors doesn't match. Inorder to achieve the backcolors matching the "UltraGroupBox" styles, every user control must have an unnecessary UltraGroupBox docked to it. Again it will be like patches if we have gradient backcolor to the parent UltraGroupBox hosting multiple usercontrols.