[Delocaz]

So i just started with C# today, and my first project was a Javascript array generator. (JS generator in C#? Weird, yes, but that's what i'm trying to do.) It all works, but when you resize the window, it's all in it's previous position. (That means if you maximize, you have A LOT of unused space.) So i wrote a function to fit all the controls when you resize. Only problem is to call that function when i resize the window. I tried to solve it for ~2 hours now, and still haven't foud a solution. (With Google!) Making a function called onresize didn't work, neither did Form1_Resize. (As it used to do in VB.NET) So, here's my code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace ArrayMaker
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            String txt = textBox2.Text;
            this.Text = "Splitting string";
            string[] arr = txt.Split(' ');
            string del = "\",\"";
            this.Text = "Joining array with delimeters";
            string cod = string.Join(del, arr);
            this.Text = "Adding prefix and suffix";
            string fin = "var " + textBox1.Text + "=[\"" + cod + "\"];";
            Clipboard.SetText(fin);
            this.Text = "Done. Result copied to clipboard.";
        }
        private void Form1_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
        {
            resize();
        }
        private void Form1_Resize(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
        {
            resize();
        }
        private void resize()
        {
            textBox1.Size = new Size(this.Width - 200, 20);
            button1.Location = new Point(this.Width - 111, 4);
            textBox2.Size = new Size(this.Width - 28, this.Height - 28);
        }
    }
}

Help a newb, please? Also, this is my first post here, so if i wrote the title wrong, broke the rules, or misspelled anything, just let me know.

Thanks in Advance!

[wuu]

You must create an event when your control is being resized. The easiest way to do this is to select a control and in properties window go under events, and then double click in a field where it says resize. All you have to do now is to call your function from there (Event had been automatically created).

[Delocaz]

wuu, on 13 August 2011 - 04:45 AM, said:

You must create an event when your control is being resized. The easiest way to do this is to select a control and in properties window go under events, and then double click in a field where it says resize. All you have to do now is to call your function from there (Event had been automatically created).

Thank you SO much! +rep to you!

[tlhIn`toq]

Let me also throw in a couple tips:
Take note of #2

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.
  btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

This post has been edited by tlhIn`toq: 13 August 2011 - 06:35 AM

[Delocaz]

tlhIn`toq, on 13 August 2011 - 06:33 AM, said:

Let me also throw in a couple tips:
Take note of #2

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.
  btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

1) Don't expect me to know all that in my very first project.
2) Is this spam? Your username looks like you're a spambot...

[tlhIn`toq]

Dude, chill. No need to be so touchy, or insulting (spambot)

Nobody *expects* you to know anything. That's why we throw out tips to help you along. Just little nuggets gained from experience. Things that are good to have in the back of your mind as you are designing your applications. Things that help you build good habits early because it is easier than un-learning bad habits later down the line.

[tlhIn`toq]

Just an observation. If you had gone through a "Learn C# in 21 days" type of self-teaching book you would have picked this up. So I am guessing you are trying to teach yourself without first going through a book or tutorial: Just jumping in and trying to design and build a program right off the bat. That really is the hard way to go.

Don't try to create a useful working program to fit a need of yours (or a for-pay contract) as your introduction to coding project. When you are learning to code you don't know enough to code a program, let alone know how to engineer the architecture of a program. It would be like saying "I don't know how to read sheet music, or play an instrument. I think I'll write a 3 act opera as my first learning experience."

We don't say this to be mean. We've seen lots of new coders take this approach and we know it doesn't work. Trying to design your own programs before you understand the basics of the code language you've chosen just leads to problems, frustrations, and 'swiss-cheese' education (lots of holes).

---

Resources, references and suggestions for new programmers. - Updated Aug 2011

---

Spoiler

The problem with taking on large, complex tasks when you are new to coding is that

• It will frustrate you to the point of quitting. We don't want you to quit. We want you to succeed and learning how to code and engineer software.
  
• You don't know enough about coding to know where to start or in what direction to design your program
  
• You risk learning via the 'Swiss cheese' method where you only learn certain bits and pieces for the one project but have huge holes in your education.

Finding answers to specific problems:
Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.
How to do a good search that will get you targeted answers.

Don't think you are the first person to ask a question. Try a search on this site to see if someone has already brought up this problem. Also, as soon as you post your question go to the bottom of the updated page: You will see where the system has already analyzed your question and tried to find similar threads for the same question, so check those links out.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book. There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

Beginner:
Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5
is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts


D.I.C. C# Resource page Start here
Intro to C# online tutorial then here...
C# control structures then here.
MSDN Beginner Developer video series
MSDN video on OOP principals, making classes, constructors, accessors and method overloading
MSDN Top guideline violations, know what to avoid before you do it.
Design patterns as diagrams

I hate sending people to another site when we have such good tutorials here, but this series shouldn't be overlooked.
Programming OOP in C# - Part 1
Programming OOP in C# - Part 2
Programming OOP in C# - Part 3
Programming OOP in C# - Part 4
Programming OOP in C# - Part 5

Writing a text file is always one of the first things people want to do, in order to store data like high-scores, preferences and so on
Writing a text file tutorial.
Reading a text file tutorial.

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Intermediate:
The tutorials below walk through making an application including inheritance, custom events and custom controls, object serialization and more.
Bulding an application - Part 1
Building an application - Part 2
Quick and easy custom events
Separating data from GUI - PLUS - serializing the data to XML
Passing values between forms/classes

Working with environmental variables
'Why do we use delegates?' thread

And everyone always wants to connect to a database, right out of the gate so
Database tutorials right here on DIC

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Everyone:
Debugging tutorial
Debugging tips
Debugging in detail
Great debugging tips
It still doesn't work, article


I urge you to work through the C# learning series here on DIC, and to work a self-teaching book from cover to cover before you even think about designing your own applications.


Microsoft Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your productivity, Microsoft press, ISBN 0-7356-2640-5
Has many, many great, real-world tips that I use all the time.

These are just good every-day references to put in your bookmarks.
MSDN C# Developers Center with tutorials
Welcome to Visual Studio
Free editions of Visual Studio 2010

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.
  btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
• You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on. You should avoid 'T' for the timer. Amongst other things 'T' is commonly used throughout C# for Type and this will lead to problems. There are naming guidelines you should follow so your code confirms to industry standards. It makes life much easier on everyone around you, including those of us here to help. If you start using the standards from the beginning you don't have to retrain yourself later.
  
  
• Learn how to search the 'net for examples.
  How to do a good search that will get you targeted answers.
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

  
  
  
• This can't be stressed enough in today's world of cell phone messaging:
  Don't use txt/sms/leet/T9 speak like: u no, u r, dnt, wut i m do-n, coz, al gud, b4, ny1, and so on like this guy:
  
  dis not b d'hood dawg... You are sitting at a real keyboard with a real monitor, not a cell phone. You are not here texting your high school posse to come to your kegger after their shift at Taco Bell. You are here asking for help from senior coding professionals who graciously donate their valuable time to helping the next generation of coders with their chosen craft. Please try to show them, yourself and the industry some respect by writing at least at an eighth grade level. (IE: English not ebonics or SMS, real words, punctuation and so on). If you can't take your own problem/question seriously enough to write like an adult, then why would you expect anyone else to take it seriously?
  
  
• I strongly suggest installing VMware or some other virtualization technology on your development PC so you can create a couple virtual computers for testing. This would allow you to debug and test inside: WinXP32, XP64, Vista, Win7x32, Win7x64... etc. without having to actually have 5 physical PC's. Visual Studio will let you send the debug directly into one of these virtual machines so you can watch it operate, check its variables, see the crashes and so on just as if it were debugging on your real machine.

[AmbientTech]

Just a thought, and I'm new to this, too. It won't resize your objects so if that's your goal sorry for the bad hint, but if you just won't them to locate more appropriately on the page position, you can also turn off the anchor properties for the object in the designer page.
Just my 2 cents worth.

[Delocaz]

AmbientTech, on 13 August 2011 - 07:50 AM, said:

Just a thought, and I'm new to this, too. It won't resize your objects so if that's your goal sorry for the bad hint, but if you just won't them to locate more appropriately on the page position, you can also turn off the anchor properties for the object in the designer page.
Just my 2 cents worth.

That wasn't my goal. My goal was to move (button) and resize (textbox) the objects so it won't look so bad when you resize thr window.

[tlhIn`toq]

I think the OP is handling the resizing programmatically.
It looks like he is just trying to get the method to run and do something to confirm it is working, first. Then fine tune the size and placement of each control.

private void Form1_Resize(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
        {
            resize();
        }
        private void resize()
        {
            textBox1.Size = new Size(this.Width - 200, 20);
            button1.Location = new Point(this.Width - 111, 4);
            textBox2.Size = new Size(this.Width - 28, this.Height - 28);
        }

[Delocaz]

tlhIn`toq, on 13 August 2011 - 06:46 AM, said:

Dude, chill. No need to be so touchy, or insulting (spambot)

Nobody *expects* you to know anything. That's why we throw out tips to help you along. Just little nuggets gained from experience. Things that are good to have in the back of your mind as you are designing your applications. Things that help you build good habits early because it is easier than un-learning bad habits later down the line.

I thought you were a spambot because of your name. (Random unpronounceable gibberish)

tlhIn`toq, on 13 August 2011 - 07:58 AM, said:

I think the OP is handling the resizing programmatically.
It looks like he is just trying to get the method to run and do something to confirm it is working, first. Then fine tune the size and placement of each control.

private void Form1_Resize(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
        {
            resize();
        }
        private void resize()
        {
            textBox1.Size = new Size(this.Width - 200, 20);
            button1.Location = new Point(this.Width - 111, 4);
            textBox2.Size = new Size(this.Width - 28, this.Height - 28);
        }

And yes, you are correct.

[tlhIn`toq]

At the risk of being insulted again, let me throw out a couple more tips:

You don't want to use this.width.
You want to use this.ClientRectangle.Width.
this.width includes the form borders which can vary in size depending on the theme the user has selected for their PC. God forbid they have some 3rd party utility that give them really futuristic looking windows like out of Minority Report. Your form will redeploy itself into something really crazy.
.ClientRectangle is the area within the boarders where your controls can reside.
http://msdn.microsof...trectangle.aspx

When I resize and relocate controls like this I tend to pick a control that a few others are meant to group around, then resize relative to that. It means making less code changes. In the example below the first button sets itself to the middle horizontally, and all the others position themselves automatically. You can change the overall spacing by changing just one variable: margin

void resize()
{
   int margin = 10; // Change all the spacing with one code change

   btnSend.Location = new Point( this.ClientRectangle.Width/2 - btnSend.Width/2, 10); // Horizontally centered
   btnReceive.Location = new Point (btnSend.Location.X, btnSend.Bounds.Bottom + margin); // Below the send button
   btnFred.Location = new point (btnSend.Bounds.Right + margin, btnSend.Location.Y); // Right of the Send button
   btnBarney.Location = new Point (btnReceive.Bounds.Right + margin, btnReceive.Location.Y); // Right of the Receive button
   txtTransmission.Location = new Point( btnBarney.Location.X, btnBarney.Bounds.Bottom + margin); // Below the Barney button
   txtTransmission.Size = new Size(btnBarney.Bounds.Right - btnReceive.Location.X, txtTransmission.Height);// Same height as designed, but span the width of both columns of buttons
}

[Delocaz]

tlhIn`toq, on 13 August 2011 - 08:23 AM, said:

At the risk of being insulted again, let me throw out a couple more tips:

You don't want to use this.width.
You want to use this.ClientRectangle.Width.
this.width includes the form borders which can vary in size depending on the theme the user has selected for their PC. God forbid they have some 3rd party utility that give them really futuristic looking windows like out of Minority Report. Your form will redeploy itself into something really crazy.
.ClientRectangle is the area within the boarders where your controls can reside.
http://msdn.microsof...trectangle.aspx

When I resize and relocate controls like this I tend to pick a control that a few others are meant to group around, then resize relative to that. It means making less code changes. In the example below the first button sets itself to the middle horizontally, and all the others position themselves automatically. You can change the overall spacing by changing just one variable: margin

void resize()
{
   int margin = 10; // Change all the spacing with one code change

   btnSend.Location = new Point( this.ClientRectangle.Width/2 - btnSend.Width/2, 10); // Horizontally centered
   btnReceive.Location = new Point (btnSend.Location.X, btnSend.Bounds.Bottom + margin); // Below the send button
   btnFred.Location = new point (btnSend.Bounds.Right + margin, btnSend.Location.Y); // Right of the Send button
   btnBarney.Location = new Point (btnReceive.Bounds.Right + margin, btnReceive.Location.Y); // Right of the Receive button
   txtTransmission.Location = new Point( btnBarney.Location.X, btnBarney.Bounds.Bottom + margin); // Below the Barney button
   txtTransmission.Size = new Size(btnBarney.Bounds.Right - btnReceive.Location.X, txtTransmission.Height);// Same height as designed, but span the width of both columns of buttons
}

Thank you.

[Curtis Rutland]

His name is Klingon, I believe. And trust me, no spambot is going to get a mentor badge or 1700 rep on this site.