Vivek's Blog

 

Do you ever feel “God, Why is this happening to me ?”. I do, in fact i felt like that a couple of minutes before posting this. Last time a different sort of YAHOO weirdness happened, again today i happened to be minding my own business and i was kindly notified (by digsby ..err…like that's important ) of an email which dropped into my mail box.

At this point i didn't notice it, then out of sheer curiosity i opened my inbox and was presented with this.(don't mind that i have 8000 unread msgs, most of it is crap.)

 

This isn't a big deal i know, so what if the FROM part is missing, but why should it. Am i being prank’ed ?

Earlier on i used send documents to myself, without a subject etc., and it used to look something like this, until it hit me hard on the head “well Duh….you could draft it..”

But that wasn't the case this time.

Ok lets lets carry on.

I opened the Message

Hmmm…No from, No to

and No this isn't spam.

But WAIT what’s that attachment thing “wpe6”, first i thought that it could be a virus, No it sure wasn't a virus. It was an Image.

And honestly this was it.

 

( Twitter? Damn, i should’ve known)

 

I wanted to dig in more so I had look at the Email Header

 

From nobody Thu Jan 28 13:02:14 2010
X-Apparently-To: vivek_bluestar@yahoo.co.in via 203.104.17.150; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:09:14 -0800
Return-Path: <sentto-8897752-27267-1264681971-vivek_bluestar=yahoo.co.in@returns.groups.yahoo.com>
X-YMailISG: W1ZVn4wWLDuaFD1TxPEIySv8.o3XC1IZoWCQmLGjCyvBCWlyqtoMv0KWf2

...........................................................

a lot of signature here…

…………………………………………
9TimjuMA/SkPXmnDHqPzrRRBgPagDI5px+opB+HtUctxByOaUySOmxmJHpgUHBHIpqkZ46VpyPsF
z//Z
--0-958699899-1264123774=:50086
Content-Type: image/gif; name=wpe6
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Id: <18.2894053169@web94801.mail.in2.yahoo.com>
Content-Length: 55297

 

I almost laughed when i read “from nobody”

I’m no email expert, but if you’re one. please do me a favor and explain, how could this be?

Am I missing something ?..

Until the next weirdness

Vivek

 

I ‘ve been for a long time searching for a way to skin my applications and give them a customized look and feel. I know that its fairly easy in Java, but in winforms its a real pain in the rear. There are a lot of fancy and lucrative options available for doing this in .Net, but only a precious few are free, one of them is the Component factory’s Krypton Tool kit.  It took stackoverflow.com about 8 hours to come up with this . Actually a SO user called renick kindly pointed me at this wonderful component. I felt so happy that i thought, I’d share this little piece of info, hence this blog post.

First a little background on the Krypton Tool Kit. Its part of the commercial Krypton Suite from component factory. While the suite itself costs a fortune, the tool kit is free. Which is sweet, because that means the basic UI elements such as the Text fields , and combo boxes are free.

You can get it by visiting

http://www.componentfactory.com/download

You’ll have to register with your email ID, which sucks I know, but trust me its worth it.

I assume that you are familiar with Visual Studio ,.Net and  the standard drills such as adding references etc.,

Once you’ve downloaded the suite (along with the toolkit)

and installed it.

You’ll have free access to the tool kit.

ComponentFactory.Krypton.Toolkit.dll

Containing

KryptonTextBox

KryptonCheckBox….

you get the idea ..

The full suite features

The office Ribbon Control

and the fancy stuff are trial only

 

which consequently means

your UI changes from Being boring like this

To looking good like this

The catch here is that the Ribbon part is licensed commercially (though its free for trial), but there are a lot of free versions of “Office Ribbon” like controls out there.

But all other controls are free.

 

How do I do It

The easy way is to Create a New Project,

since it provides some nice project templates

But the problem is the Templates vanish once you’ve uninstalled the trial.

So here’s a little hack to get the Tool Kit Assembly

The assemblies are not placed in the Global Assembly Cache, instead at  (You know where):\Program Files\Component Factory\Krypton Toolkit 4.1.1\Bin\

like so

You may copy the Tool kit Library, since it’s license is free.

(Note: after acquiring the library, you may as well ditch the installed software.)

You can place the assembly where ever you like and add reference to your heart’s content.

 

Now as you’ve probably noticed this tool box section doesn’t feature a form (nor does the standard tool set)

For that you have to inherit your normal form from the class

ComponentFactory.Krypton.Toolkit.KryptonForm.

 

using System.Windows.Forms;
using ComponentFactory.Krypton.Toolkit;
namespace WindowsFormsApplication
{
    public partial class Form1 : KryptonForm

    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

………….

………..

 

To change the theme of the form and its child element theres a component called KryptonManager in the Tool Box

which provides a property (enum) called

KryptonManager.GlobalPalletteMode

which can be set to any one of the following

 

The one that was immediately interesting to me was the “Custom” option.

The Palette (in this context it means, a definition of “what” should be in “what” color) Definition for each theme is defined as a KryptonPalette class.

The component features a design time functionality, using which we can export the theme or import custom ones as plain XML files.

I encourage you to experiment with the custom theme , because that's where you can do some serious damage !

Chow !

Vivek