Crystal Toolkit: Alpha Release 0.75

By
Richard Guion
 on: April 21, 2007 12:49 AM | | Comments (0)

Crystal Toolkit is a Windows Forms (.NET Framework 2.0) control library written in C#. This is the seventh release and contains the following updates:

Enhancements.

  1. CrystalCollector: AddImage and AddImageItem methods allow you to add images without calling CollectImages and having it auto-magically thumbnail images. In using these methods, you pay a price in having to setup things correctly. See the demo program BorderSplitMode for more details about how this is used with CrystalMemoryCollector.

Demo Programs Expanded.

  1. Demo Launcher program starts all demos. Click on "StartDemo.bat" in the root Attilan folder or CrystalDemoLauncher.exe in Attilan\bin.

  2. Simple Image Grid Demo: A simple illustration of how to use CrystalImageGridView with the CrystalFileCollector to thumbnail disk-based images in a background thread.

  3. BorderSplitMode Demo: Use CrystalImageGridView and a derived Collector to assign each image item its own border color, as I explained here in this article.

  4. CrystalPictureBox Demo: Use CrystalPictureBox to display scrollable or ratio-stretched images.

  5. CrystalPictureShow Demo: Use CrystalImageGridView to navigate thumbnail images and then use CrystalPictureShow to display them and perform Slideshows.

  6. WaitForm PictureShow Demo: Use CrystalPictureShow to create a unique wait dialog.

Bug fixes.

  1. CrystalTrackBar: SmallChange and LargeChange were implemented. Control was not behaving properly when nested inside a container like a Panel or GroupBox. I also fixed a bug where the thumb was not able to move between ticks, if you were going from 0 to 10, it would skip to 10. Now it will go 0, 1, 2, 3...10. In fixing CrystalTrackBar, I decided to prohibit TransparentMode. It wasn't working very well. I had no intention of making a TrackBar replacement, my goal was just to get a TrackBar on a ToolStrip. I've taken my old implementation of CrystalTrackBar and placed this into CrystalFixedTrackBar, which is used only by CrystalToolStripTrackBar. I'm afraid the TrackBar component will never be a full replacement in either case, but it works well enough in my Image Viewer application that I'm happy with it.

  2. CrystalImageGridView: UseAlpha was set to true by default. This is now set to false by default.

  3. CrystalComicShow: Normal "non-comic CDisplay" images were incorrectly displayed when going back using the left arrow key.

This release comes in a ZIP file. Simply unzip the contents to your hard drive, navigate to the root Attilan folder, and double click on CrystalDemo.sln. This solution file contains the Crystal Toolkit plus demo programs. Just build the solution (which compiles the CrystalToolkit library first) and run the demo programs to see how they work. You can run the demo programs without building the source by clicking on "StartDemo.bat" in the root Attilan folder or CrystalDemoLauncher.exe in Attilan\bin.

I've tested the demos under Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista. Needless to say, buyers beware, this is alpha software and it's free open-source code: you get what you pay for! I'd welcome any feedback, bugs (or bug fixes), and thumb-bitmap replacements. Send email to richard [at] attilan {dot} com.

Download: Crystal Toolkit 075 (zip file, 4.2 mb)

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