New download: Ookii.Dialogs

I have made available a new download: Ookii.Dialogs.

Ookii.Dialogs is a class library that provides a number of common dialogs for use in .Net applications. The dialogs provided are the task dialog, progress dialog, credential dialog, input dialog and Vista-style common file dialogs.

The download contains two class libraries, one for Windows Forms and one for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The contents are nearly identical; only the input dialog is not available for WPF. Some utility classes are provided for Windows Forms; these are not available for WPF either.

Most of these dialogs are wrappers around Windows API functionality. The TaskDialog class wraps the task dialog API provided in Windows Vista and later. The ProgressDialog class wraps the IProgressDialog API available since Windows 2000. The CredentialDialog class wraps the CredUI API introduced in Windows XP, and the VistaOpenFileDialog, VistaSaveFileDialog and VistaFolderBrowserDialog classes wrap the IFileDialog API introduced in Windows Vista. Only the InputDialog is not a wrapper; this is a custom dialog that performs the same functionality as the old Visual Basic InputBox function. Visit the link above for more details on each dialog.

Each class has been designed to be not merely a wrapper around their respective native API, but to provide a programming interface that is natural to .Net developers, with full support for the component designer. The complete source code of the class libraries, as well as documentation and a sample application are provided.

The classes aim to give the best experience possible on each OS, where applicable. In the case of the CredentialDialog class, this means that the new Vista-style dialog is automatically used on operating systems that support it (Vista and newer). The Vista-style file dialog classes will automatically fall back to the old style dialogs when using Windows XP. This is also true of the VistaFolderBrowserDialog class for WPF, even though WPF itself doesn't provide a folder browser dialog; the VistaFolderBrowserDialog class is a full folder browser dialog implementation for WPF supporting XP and newer.

This library replaces the Ookii.VistaDialogs library, which contained only the Vista-style file dialogs and didn't offer any support for WPF.

This library is a collection of classes that I have developed for personal use over the years. Because of the difference in age of some of the code, and the many modifications made over time, there may be some inconsistencies.

Let me know what you think of it, if you use it.

Categories: Software, General computing, Programming
Posted on 2009-01-28 11:54:11 UTC. Show Comments (6)

Improving Japanese fonts in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Vista

If you've visited Japanese sites, you're probably used to the text looking something like this:

A webpage using MS PGothic

The font used here is called MS PGothic. It's quite an old font, and it actually uses bitmaps for smaller sizes like that one. This means there's no anti-aliasing at all, including ClearType. So Japanese text ends up looking a lot less nice than western text, especially if you've got ClearType enabled (which you probably do; it's on by default in Vista).

Windows Vista includes a brand new, much better, Japanese font, called Meiryo, which is optimized for screen reading and is fully ClearType enabled. Unfortunately, MS PGothic is still the default Japanese font in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Fortunately, we can change that by doing the following:

  1. Click Tools, Internet Options;
  2. Click the Fonts button;
  3. Under Language script, choose Japanese;
  4. Under Webpage font, choose Meiryo;
    The Internet Explorer fonts dialog
  5. Now, under Language script, choose Chinese (simplified);
  6. Again, set Webpage font to Meiryo.

You must do this for both Japanese and Chinese, otherwise not all characters will be displayed with the new font. Now your fonts should look something like this:

A webpage using Meiryo

You can achieve the same effect in Firefox. The following instructions apply to Firefox 3:

  1. Click Tools, Options;
  2. Click Content;
  3. Under Fonts & Colors, click Advanced;
  4. Set Fonts for to Japanese;
  5. Set the desired fonts to Meiryo;

Of course this only applies to sites that don't specify a font. If a webpage specifies in the HTML or CSS that it wants t use PGothic or another Japanese font, it will use that instead of your selection. In Firefox you can choose to have your choice override whatever font the page specifies; in IE, you cannot.

Category: General computing
Posted on 2008-10-10 09:32:00 UTC. Show Comments (4)

FormatC source code formatting

I am proud to announce a new utility here on Ookii.org: FormatC.

FormatC is a utility that allows you to add syntax highlighting to your C#, Visual Basic, C++, XML, HTML, Transact-SQL or PowerShell source code, so you can publish it on a web page or blog post.

Why does the world need yet another syntax highlighter? Mainly, because of none of the existing .Net based ones had the features I needed. That's right, FormatC is the utility I've been using to format source code for my own blog. So if you read my site you've already seen many examples, including this one which demonstrates one of those features I mentioned: Visual Basic XML literals. I dare say I'm one of the first to actually support that, although it does have some limitations (which are mentioned on the FormatC page). In fact, I have support for all C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0 features, including Linq.

You can format your source code using the interface on my site and simply copy/paste the results into a webpage or blog post, and customize the highlighting by editing the provided style sheet (or simply keep the default). You can also download FormatC as a class library to use in your own application, or look at the source code. It's designed to be easily extensible, so you can add your own languages if you want.

If you use it, let me know what you think.

Categories: Software, General computing, Programming
Posted on 2008-09-06 09:46:27 UTC. Show Comments (3)

Find As You Type and IE8 beta 2

Internet Explorer logo In case you missed it (which I think is only possible if you read no blogs except mine), Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released today. Beta 2 fixes some of the issues that beta 1 had and brings a lot of new stuff to the table especially for the casual user (beta 1 really was only a developer preview, after all). It's definitely worth checking out.

Some of you may remember that my Find As You Type add-on didn't exactly work very well in beta 1. So what's the story with beta 2?

First of all: IE8 now includes functionality similar to Find As You Type! This will surprise precisely no one since the feature was originally planned for IE7 but postponed. Now with IE8 beta 2, it's finally in there. IE8's new find functionaly works pretty much the same as my FAYT add-on, so there's really not much reason to keep using FAYT.

However, for those of you that do wish to keep using FAYT (for instance for some of features that IE8's new built-in find lacks, such as customization, auto-start, and immediate search while using an IME), there is good news also: unlike with beta 1, Find As You Type works fine with IE8 beta 2. The only thing that appears broken is that if you press CTRL-F when the focus is on the browser chrome (e.g. the address bar or search box), the FAYT toolbar does not open, instead IE's own find opens. If you press CTRL-F while a page has focus, the FAYT toolbar will open just like it does in IE7. I suspect this has something to do with the modified process model that IE8 uses for tabs.

Please let me know your experiences with FAYT and IE8, if you have any.

Categories: Software, General computing
Posted on 2008-08-28 08:36:50 UTC. Show Comments (1)

Win an MSDN subscription

My good friend Christian Liensberger is giving away two MSDN Premium with Visual Studio Team System subscriptions, worth nearly $11,000! To be eligable you need to create a short screencast about a Microsoft technology, e.g. "how to get started with Silverlight 2". The competition runs from July 1st until July 31st. I will be helping with the judging.

See Christian's blog for full details.

Categories: General computing, Programming
Posted on 2008-06-28 14:22:25 UTC. Show Comments (1)