Vista Docking Indicators
Just a quick update to show a couple of pictures with a new indicator style. If you are using Visual Studio 2008 under Vista then you will have noticed that the docking indicators are not square anymore. Under Vista it uses rounded indicators so of course we need to provide that style as well. Here we have the mouse hovering over the cell top edge indicator…
And over the middle indicator…
Intelligent Defaults
All of the built in palettes test for the operating system in order to decide on the appropriate feedback. So on Vista you get rounded and on earlier systems you get the square view as seen in the previous post. It also tests to ensure that your display has more than 8 bits per pixel color.
This is important because when running over remote desktop or terminal services the bandwidth is kept down by using only 256 colors per-pixel. In that case you cannot use the WS_EX_LAYERED setting that is required for the rounded appearance. In order to get a smooth rounded edge you need per-pixel alpha capabilities and so you must use a layered window. With only 256 colors per-pixel your not going to get proper alpha blending and so it is best to fall back to using the docking squares.
August 27th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Thank god you didn’t design it like many of the children’s software applications I saw back in the Windows 95 days. Who remembers a dialog with something like this:
“Your color depth is set to a value higher than 256 colors. Please reduce the color depth to 256 colors and try again.”
I remember seeing them for desktop resolution with limits as low as 640×480 and I even saw a color depth have to be set to 16 once. Not 16 bit but 16 colors. And before someone asks, the programs were for my much younger step-sister.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I just rechecked and it seems that Terminal Services can provide color depth better than 8bits but sometimes can be as low as 8bits. So actually you might be fine running Remote Desktop after all.
September 5th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Just out of curiosity … will we be able to dock KryptonPages when the navigator will be in Outlook Full/Mini Mode?
E.g.
1. Dock a page into the Navigator
2. Dock a page into another page (separated by a splitter)
September 5th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Yes, page dragging works for all the Navigator modes so you can drag and drop pages onto the Outlook modes and it will add those new pages. If you want a splitter to appear then you need the Workspace and not just the Navigator. The Workspace allows you to drop on the cell and so add the pages to the existing Navigator or to drop next to it so a splitter and another Navigator are created.