Design-Time Support Overview

In This Topic

Nevron Open Vision (NOV) comes with extensive Visual Studio design-time support and integration. Upon installation of NOV you can also choose to integrate the NOV controls in the Visual Studio toolbox by checking the "Register in VS Toolbox" check box. Nevron Open Vision fully supports both the WinForms and the WPF designer and as with everything related to NOV, the designer support is also identical on all platforms.

NOV controls are standard WinForms or WPF controls that host a NOV widgets. The controls expose most of the properties and events of the hosted NOV widget, which makes it easy to directly modify the NOV widget properties or subscribe to its event. If you want to access the hosted NOV widget, use the Widget property of the NOV control.

This documentation topic presents the design-time support functionality that is available for both WinForms and WPF.

Note that if you decide to use the Visual Studio designers, you lose the portability of your NOV application and it will no longer be cross-platform, because Visual Studio designers produce platform specific code.

Control Properties and Content

Editing NOV control properties and content is based around verbs that are shown in a popup window next to the control when you click on the smart tag icon of the control:


Nevron WinForms Smart Tags	Nevron WPF Smart Tags

The smart tags let you quickly set the content and the most commonly used properties of the NOV control. When you click a menu item from the popup, a dialog opens and you will be able to configure the selected property of the NOV control. The same commands are also available in the context menu of the control that appears when you right click it in the designer.

The following commands are available for most NOV controls:

Edit Content - lets you quickly set some text, image or both for a content holder widget like NButton, NLabel and so on.
Change Background - modifies the background fill of the control.
Change Text Fill - modifies the text fill of the control.
Change Border - changes the border and border thickness of the control.
Properties - opens a dialog that lets you modify most of the properties of the underlying NOV widgets.

Most of the NOV controls' properties can only be accessed and edited through these smart tags and the context menu commands and not through the Visual Studio properties window.

NOV controls expose the properties of the widget they host directly, but you can also edit them in code by using the Widget property of the control. You can use it to easily change the NOV widget properties:

button.Widget.HorizontalPlacement = ENHorizontalPlacement.Center;

Document view with ribbon controls like NDrawingViewWithRibbonControl, NRichTextViewWithRibbonControl, etc. do not have the smart tags shown above. Instead they have a Configure Ribbon smart tag that lets you quickly show and hide commands from the ribbon by checking and unchecking them in a tree view:

Control Events

You can use the Events tab of the Visual Studio properties window to subscribe to events related to the NOV controls. Note that most of the controls also have a default event, for example the Click event of an NButtonControl, the SelectedIndexChanged event of an NComboBoxControl, etc. When you double click a control in the designer, Visual Studio will automatically create an event handler for its default event.

The documentation topics in the "See Also" section below discuss in more details the design-time support of the NOV controls for specific platforms.