Alright Bobby, I'll throw done! Lets see some of this great stuff yo be dissen us wit! :pissed:
Seriously - If I had the time to learn another language it'd be C++. I have a large amount of Lisp that works just fine - I just needed something other than plain ole DCL. Would I love to learn a net language - sure. Here's a thought: why don't you do a Project DOT NET palette, like the VBA project I did and show us the basics - nothing fancy - just how to get started . . ? I know I'd appreciate it!
Good to hear from you,
jb
Hey JB,
It's good to "see" you again too
It would be difficult to create a form with all of the controls available to .NET, even just the OOTB controls. Could I just show you what's available? And let me state up front that I am no expert on WinForms, in fact I would rate myself as a GUI novice. I have an O'Reilly "In A Nutshell" book on them...and that's about it
The first attached image is the Winforms Toolbox in the current project that I'm working on. The top portion, LevelManager Components, are little reusable pieces that I've created to place on my form. They can have their own methods, properties, and events. Once created these can be dragged onto any other form or control in the project.
The second attached image is a ToolSection component that I created. I can drag this onto another component and pass it a string for the label (it's a property that I created). The third image is my palette with a number of these tool sections, each containing other custom controls that I created. Please ignore the extreme ugliness of the palette. It's early in the design phase and most of the text will be replaced with images and other niceties later
Now if I make a change to the base ToolSection component, all three of the instances on the palette will show the update. My entire form is built this way, even down to the buttons. Later, after the overall layout is finished I can update my custom button class, to show images instead of text or something, and all instances of it will change. From ugly to cool in seconds
VB6 will allow you to build controls like this, but it's a no can do in VBA.
Looking over the list of OOTB controls, we've got all of the standard buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, treeviews, labels, and such. There are also controls for most of the common dialogs like OpenFileDialog and FolderBrowserDialog. There are other cool ones like MenuStrip and ToolStrip. Some are there just for support, like the ToolStripContainer which places containers to dock menu's and toolbars to the top, bottom, and sides of your window.
And that's just the tip of the iceburg. You have so much control over the layout of your forms and how nested controls react to their parents stretching and such. But like I said, I'm no expert and I doubt that I'm doing WinForms justice.
Mick's link is a good simple palette project. Below are some links to some other simple code that I posted a while back.
Adding tabs to the Options Dialog
http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=8190.0Application and document pane buttons
http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=8191.0Custom Palettes
http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=8192.0Aside from the wonders of WinForms and the areas of the AutoCAD Editor opened up by the .NET API, in 2007 you can now create procedures in .NET that can be run from lisp. You can pass parameters into the procedures and have them return values. This feature allows you to fire up a WinForm, collect data from the user, and return that data for processing in your lisp code. You're not going to run lisp code as event callbacks with this feature, but it does provide a nice bridge to share data between your lisp and .net apps.
Anyway, I hope that gives you a little flavor of what can be done. When R12 came out I went nuts with DCL. I loved it. The day that I opened up MS Access for the first time and designed a form I never ever wanted to touch DCL again. I feel the same way with VB6 and VBA forms now. They just don't compare, at all.
As for language, I have no doubt that you'll pick up VB.NET, or C#, without a lot of trouble. I did and I'll be the first to admit that you're a more intelligent man than I am. (for those of you that don't know James, I'm not kidding, this guy is sharp!)