SharpLayout 0.8.5 released #.NET #sharplayout

Okay, I think I'll declare SharpLayout 0.8.5 to be semi-officially released. It doesn't have a Web site yet (unless you count this blog), but you can download it here. This ZIP contains just the controls themselves, not the demo projects; I'll probably get around to releasing those later. Installation: Compile the project, right-click in the toolbox, select "Add/Remove Items", browse to the DLL, and there you go.

So what the heck is SharpLayout? It's two (so far) Windows Forms controls that do basic flow-layout types of things. FlowLabel is like a Label with word-wrapping, except that a FlowLabel automatically adjusts its height to exactly fit the text inside it (and readjusts when its width changes). Throw in adjustable margins all around, and this is a good way to put several paragraphs of text into a GUI (using the margins for inter-paragraph spacing), and/or interspersing them with hyperlinks, buttons, graphics, whatever. The general idea is to allow you to write something along the lines of Microsoft's Inductive UI without embedding IE or waiting for Longhorn.

FlowLabel can also display an imagelist image next to the text (and unlike a normal Label, it actually makes space for the image, instead of overlapping it with the text). Other interesting properties: you can specify antialiased text; and you can turn borders on and off for each of the four edges and set the border color.

FlowLinkLabel descends from FlowLabel, and along with all of FlowLabel's capabilities, adds (not surprisingly) abilities more or less like a LinkLabel, though unlike LinkLabel, it supports hover effects.

Both FlowLabel and FlowLinkLabel are safe to use in a partial-trust environment, and I regularly test them in the Internet zone to make sure they work (though in the Internet zone, FlowLinkLabel loses the ability to cope with a few pathological edge cases).

There are a few features yet to be written, but for the most part, these controls are basically functional. The main things I still want to write are FlowLinkLabel features: (1) focus rectangles (and focus support in general — get focus when you click on the link, that sort of thing), and (2) support for popping up a context menu by using Alt+F10 or the "context menu" key (currently disabled in FlowLinkLabel in order to support another feature: the context menu only appears if you right-click on the hyperlink, not if you right-click on non-hyperlink text or on an empty part of the control).

A few other features are negotiable, since I don't expect to need them myself: multiple hyperlinks per FlowLinkLabel; support for putting the hyperlink in the middle of a paragraph (you can currently put the link at the beginning of a paragraph, but you can't have any non-linked text before the link); right-justified text and/or image on the right; and probably others as well.

Feedback is more than welcome, as are questions about the code. This is a blog, after all.