•  Gloss Contour Suite™ (GCS) — primary button and surface classes for all .NET development tools

GlossContourButton™ drew our logo images.

Gloss Contour Button and Surface Suite™ delivers "to die for" visual appeal, tab and MouseOver capable focus, light footprints, and futuristic "ContourClient™" drawing behavior to .Net user interfaces.

When we first expanded to .Net from Win32, we were disturbed by the absence of a useful equivalent to the Delphi™/CPPB™ Speedbutton. TSpeedbutton eliminated the pronounced delineation and convolution of conventional buttons — making it indispensable to the cleanest, most uncluttered UIs. Gloss Contour Suite™ (GCS) allows developers to maintain this style of interface design, to readily build indispensable features such as wrapping toolbars and toggle controls, and to benefit from GCS's ground breaking surface conformation and group drawing technologies.

Gloss Contour Button and Surface Suite™ also allows you to do important things beyond the capacities of Visual Studio's ToolStrip and ToolStripContainer controls. GCS allows you to easily build toolbars or wrapping toolbars in which the contours of the toolbar exist either in the tool buttons themselves, or in the GCS surface they belong to. Freed of the spatial restrictions of ToolStrip implementations, your essential tools can make the best use of available space.

Multiple GlossContourButtons™ in ContourClient™ roles to a GlossContourSurface™. In its automated client role, each button does not have to compute its drawing surface data — it simply derives necessary subsets for every state from pre-computed server (GlossContourSurface™) data. Buttons are shown in various disabled, enabled, and toggle (normal/down) states — all derived from pre-computed server information.

GCS goes much farther than its TSpeedbutton predecessor — producing stunning .Net interfaces with tab and MouseOver capable focus, exceedingly light footprints, and futuristic stand-alone or "ContourClient™" drawing behavior. Automated ContourClient/Server roles produce ultra-fast group drawing by eliminating overlapping, redundant computation of surface drawing data. Drawing speed computation advantages for 20 client buttons approach 20:1 for instance, because client buttons simply draw themselves from data already computed by the server instance, as necessary to draw the server itself. Because client buttons automatically derive their surface drawing data from subsets of pre-computed server instance data, you can readily build exotic features such as wrapping toolbars in which each button will *automatically* draw itself with the contours of the server, wherever and whenever it is positioned on the server surface. You don't write a line of code to benefit from this valuable behavior. Yet you get drawing speed and behavior that no other component can touch.

Free evaluation use — and priced to make Gloss Contour Suite™ a standard tool of practically all .Net developers.

•  ULTIMATE PAGE CONTROL SUITE™ for Win32 Development with Delphi™ and C++Builder™

PM04 "DataMaster™" module of Ultimate Page Control Suite™.

Ultimate Page Control Suite™ (UPC™) is the premier foundation for Paged, Multiple Workspace ("PMW") application development — a technically superior alternative to MDI. PMW is practically an obligatory format for substantial applications. Yet PMW readily transforms even single workspace applications into far more valuable implementations which can be developed at less cost than their single-workspace predecessors. Informally, PMW has even become the virtual standard for visual development environments.

Ultimate Page Control Suite™ is a prebuilt format for building PMW UIs. UPC™ implementations feature exceedingly light footprints, exceptional speed, pre-built navigation, automatic support for huge page populations, and sophisticated features such as paged, auto-wrapping toolbars. The first click which places a UPC™ control in your Win32 UI can save you megabucks — while delivering performance you may never touch otherwise.

A free example application demonstrates incredible speed and robust support for greater page populations than you have probably seen before.

•  CLICK HERE for FREE DEMO download links, BUY UPC links, related articles on the Paged Multiple Workspace application format, and full online Ultimate Page Control Suite Win32™ documentation.

DELPHI™, C++BUILDER™ TECHNICAL

CALLING CLASS METHODS OR STATIC FUNCTIONS — AN INTRODUCTION FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPERS

COMPILING RESOURCE (.RES) FILES FROM RESOURCE COMPILER (.RC) TEXT FILE PRESCRIPTIONS, AND USING LoadFromResourceName

ROOT CLASSES — OOP BASE CLASSES WE CAN WORK WITH

In the years which have passed since we first made these recommendations to Borland, what we intended to accomplish by this suggestion has become a principal design feature of C#. In C# however (and now in other Microsoft .NET tools), defined member properties are simply eliminated in a descendant by writing designers and overriding a PreFilterProperties( ) designer method. If this results in CIL (Compiled Intermediate Language) instructions which simply leave out undesirable members, and if designers are never ported into end product, alright — this delivers our objective in a relatively efficient fashion. Otherwise, the following class design prescription is an obligation, deviation from which can only obstruct proper descendant class library design. Tools not built to these standards do not mean only that the best further product cannot be built with them — tools/libraries failing to meet this standard *often* mean that only very undesirable product can be derived from them.

VITAL FIXES FOR FUNDAMENTAL OWNERSHIP AND STREAMING PROBLEMS IN THE DELPHI™ IDE

Here too, in the years which have passed since we expressed our imperative need that Borland fix these issues, proper support for streaming/serialization has become a principal instrument of Microsoft .Net tools. Our current projects are just now testing whether Microsoft implementations meet the necessary standards to develop some of the more complex visual control implementations we have succeeded in, despite these critical flaws in Borland Delphi™ and C++Builder™. As to how "well" Borland tools might support .NET implementations which are essential to our own goals... we can only report that no commitment to cooperate in rectifying these faults means we cannot continue to use Borland tools.

WORKAROUND FOR THE PERPETUAL DELPHI™ SHUTDOWN AV: ACCESS VIOLATION AT ADDRESS 002BA534 IN MODULE 'vcl70.bpl'

GLOSS CONTOUR BUTTON™, GLOSS CONTOUR SURFACE™, HOW TO — ARTICLES AND EXAMPLE SOURCE

GlossContour Suite™ INSTALLATION

HOW TO IMPLEMENT EFFICIENT TOGGLE GROUP BEHAVIOR

Writing efficient, type safe code to implement toggle group behavior.

WALKTHROUGH 1 — DESIGNING GlossContourSurfaces™, DEPLOYING AS ContourServers™

Basic configuration of GlossContourSurfaces™ in preparation for Walkthrough 2.

WALKTHROUGH 2 — DESIGNING GlossContourButtons™, DEPLOYING AS ContourServers™ OR ContourClients™

How to configure color, color offsets, gloss, glare, and 3D effects. ContourServer™/ContourClient™ implementation.

NET TECHNICAL

VITAL TECHNIQUES FOR USING OBJECTS AS .NET PROPERTIES

Our experience with Visual Studio 2005™ demonstrates that function calls are not fired in outer set accessors of properties subject to TypeConverters. This article first revisits how to deploy TypeConverters so that your class properties will be displayed from a nested node in Properties View. It then demonstrates the necessary pattern for declaring DefaultValueAttributes, and for writing set accessors that will successfully fire vital accessor functions.

PAGED, MULTIPLE WORKSPACE (PMW)

GOALS OF THE PAGED, MULTIPLE WORKSPACE (PMW) APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT MODEL

HOW TO BUILD SUPERIOR PAGED, MULTIPLE WORKSPACE (PMW) APPLICATIONS