SmartNavigator .NET
- Modern & stylish Tab and List box controls
- Ready to use, right out-of-the-box
- Highly customizable in respect of colors and display orientation
- Out-of-the-box customized ControlTemplate and Style object
BinarySmartNavigator .NET provides a new way to present scrollable content in your WPF .NET applications.
Instead of displaying data in tab pages/traditional listbox and let users to select / scroll across pages, you can now let your users view rich content and scroll across items/pages in a modern Listbox control manner.
The control also provides a new and fancy way to scroll across items, by providing nice looking buttons and visually cute looking circles that indicate which item to scroll to / select next.
The package includes two controls written natively for WPF presentation framework.: A modern Tab control, and a modern ListBox control.
List box style of displaying multiple items / content
BinarySmartNavigator .NET can be visualized as a tab/listbox control but with a new way of presenting and scrolling the tab pages/list items.
Each item in this control can host any content (controls), and to scroll across items in the control you would click on the arrow keys (or the round buttons) to scroll up/down.
The control also provides page selection controls in its side bar, so that if the users needed to go to the last item (page) or first item (page) quickly, he could click on those controls to scroll to that item / page.
This gives you a very nice and customizable Tab strip control that is ready to use out-of-the-box.
Its got several styles of rendering including Visual Studio style, Diamond, Trapezium, and a host of others, and currently supports two orientations (Top and Bottom).
The control also has some neat animations such as performing transforms upon mouse hovering into a tab header, rendering currently inactive (or not selected/mouse-hovered) tab items to be rendered in a translucent / transparent mode, and more.
Highly customizable in respect of colors and display orientation
The controls provides simple to use properties that will let you set the colors for drawing the various UI elements, including the scroll buttons, item/page jump buttons in the side bar, the color of the sidebar, the item/page selection background color and its border color, the control's border thickness and color.
You can of course write you own ListBoxItem control template, and host your ListBoxItem instances in our control to give a different look and feel to the items in the control, and continue to get our custom list box control UI and behaviour.
The product installation comes with easy to understand sample projects to use these controls, written entirely in XAML. No need to write any code to use these controls out-of-the-box.
The control supports several types of animations to animate the tab page navigation, namely the following:
- None (the default)
- ScrollUpContent
- ScrollUpContentAndScrollItemIndicator
- AnimateItemIndicator
- ContentVanishesAndAppears
Out-of-the-box customised ControlTemplate and Style object
As part of the product, you also get a pre-written ControlTemplate and Style for a custom ListBoxItem control that you can use straight out-of-the-box as ListBoxItem instance for the SmartListBox control.
This pre-written custom ListBoxItem ControlTemplate provides a set of properties for you to configure, and when used in the BinarySmartListBox control, renders a nice-looking UI that is frequently found needed in any day-to-day projects.
The following are the screen-shots of BinarySmartListBox control in action, using our pre-written ControlTemplate for the custom ListBoxItem it is hosting:
Easy usage of the built-in custom BinarySmartListBoxItem control
In contrast to the very powerful features in the control, you will find it extremely easy to setup and run the control in your applications with absolutely no procedural code.
You can see a screen-shot below that displays a XAML code snippet demonstrating its ease of use, and the rich UI properties that are exposed.
Note that these customizable properties are all DependencyPropertys, and hence can be set using WPF DataBinding mechanism.
Events, and rich built-in actions
The controls raise appropriate events to notify of several happenings, including events to indicate that a page / item has been selected.
The control provides its own scrolling logic (via the navigation buttons for moving across items/pages).
This also includes built-in support for full keyboard based navigation across items (using arrow keys), and the usual Ctrl + Home and Ctrl + End to navigate to the first and the last item/page in the controls respectively.
Templatising the controls
If you want to, then just like you would expect from a WPF custom control, BinarySmartNavigator and ListBox controls can be easily templatised by creating and setting up your own ControlTemplate for these controls, so long as you provide the required TemplatePart elements that these controls require in your custom control template, for its (custom navigation) behaviour logic to work for your templatised version of these controls.