Overview

RadForm is Telerik's skinnable alternative to the standard Windows Form that allows you to design and display MS Office 2007-like rounded forms. You can combine this control with other Telerik controls, such as Telerik StatusStrip, to easily create forms with a custom look and feel to fit your application design.

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Features

• Form for Windows Forms
• Shaped Form
• Ribbon Form
• Color Dialog
• Title Bar
• Status Strip
• Message Box
• About Box
• Visual Studio Form Templates
• Appearance
• Localization and Right-to-Left Language Support

• Form for Windows Forms

  RadForm is Telerik's skinable alternative to the standard Windows Form, but supercharged with MS Office 2007-like rounded corners, themes, MDI support, and full integration with the rest of the Telerik controls. All features are easy and intuitive to use, available immediately after adding RadForm to your project.
  
  Features:
  

  • Easy Customization - Almost all properties of RadForm are the same as those of a standard Windows Form. You can use your knowledge of the Form class to customize your RadForm to your requirements;
  • Full Integration with Telerik RadControls - RadForm comes with integrated RadTitleBar for better control over its visual appearance. It also supports full and effortless integration with any of the Telerik form controls such as RadStatusStrip, RadRibbonBar and RadMenu for straightforward form creation and ease of development:
    
     
  • MDI Support - RadForm can be used in Multiple Document Interface (MDI) scenarios. With MDI, a single menu bar (based on RadMenu) and/or toolbar is shared among all child windows, reducing clutter and increasing the efficient use of screen space. With the help of RadMenu's menu-merging feature, and when a child form is maximized, RadMenu automatically merges its items to the menu in the parent form; when a child form is restored/minimized, the parent and child menu states are restored. RadForm also provides minimize, restore, maximize, and inactive states for the main and child forms.
    
    

  • Active/inactive state support with animation transitions - depending on the focused form, RadForm is either active or inactive, whereas the transition between the states is animated:

    

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• Shaped Form

  Unlike RadForm, ShapedForm actually descends from a standard windows Form. It comes with a RadTitleBar so the user can move, close, minimize and maximize the form. Both the RadTitleBar and the ShapedForm by default each have their Shape property set to RoundRectShape. You can also use one of the predefined shapes, or you can create your own custom shape using the Shape Editor tool.
  
  

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• Ribbon Form

  Telerik RibbonForm is a specialized form that comes pre-configured with a Telerik RibbonBar and a StatusStrip so that you don't have to spend time setting up this first layer of the UI. It also comes with a set of minimize, maximize and close form buttons so that you do not have to add these yourself. 

  Telerik RibbonForm comes with transparency support under Windows Vista and Windows 7, which can be turned on/off with a single property. It also offers full Theme support which can be used from the very start of your project. You can use any of the pre-defined themes, or build a new one from scratch to fit your exact scenario.

  

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• Color Dialog

  Telerik RadColorDialog is a lightweight UI component that allows users to select colors from the RGB or HSL color spaces. The dialog is highly configurable and offers great flexibility in selecting colors from web, system, and professional colors, together with the ability to fine-tune and pick colors directly from the screen. 

  To speed up your work, the Color Dialog is shipped with four ready-to-use color palettes:

  The Basic palette lets you choose a predefined color from a honeycomb interface where you click a colored cell to choose the color	System lets you choose one of the System.Drawing.SystemColors enumerations from a list. Each is a color of a Windows display element (i.e. ButtonShadow, ActiveCaptionText, etc)
  Web lets you choose one of the named web colors from a list	The Professional palette provides the greatest flexibility in selecting or tailoring the exact color you require

  
  Features at a glance:
  

  • Transparency control - any color you select can have its transparency (alpha) channel modified to suit your needs. This feature allows for extra flexibility in selecting colors;
  • Custom colors - RadColorDialog lets you save custom colors. Use any of the color selection tools to select a color, including the eye dropper, and use the Add Custom Color functionality to retain custom colors between invocations of the color dialog;
  • Color picker (eye-dropper) tool - the user can pick another color from anywhere on the screen by using the provided Eye Dropper tool;
  • Color preview - RadColorDialog can display the current color in a dedicated color preview area, together with its HSL, RGB and HEX representations. The hexadecimal entry can be edited or copied/pasted from/to another source.

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• Title Bar

  Telerik TitleBar is a separate RadControl, which can be dropped on any standard Form, ShapedForm or RadForm to provide the form with a set of customizable maximize, minimize and close buttons. Each button is a RadButtonElement that includes properties to control its text, image, and layout. The title bar can be manually skinned to match the form's UI, or can use one of the preset themes.

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• Status Strip

  Telerik StatusStrip represents an area that displays various kinds of status information in an application. Fully themable, RadStatusStrip can hold any Telerik control such as RadButton or RadProgressBar, to display text and images, and to indicate item state and/or operation progress. 

  Features:

  • Two different types of layouts - Telerik StatusStrip supports two different types of layouts: a Table layout for positioning items in a table-like fashion, and a Resizable layout with support for the parent form's sizing and moving grips;
  • "Spring" functionality - available in the Resizable layout, the Spring property allows for dynamic resizing of each element to fit in the status strip space. It also determines whether the form is resized and stretches the control(s) to fill the newly available space automatically;
  • Host any Telerik RadElement - RadStatusStrip is built on the innovative Telerik Presentation Framework and provides a status area that can be composed of any number of RadElement types: buttons, repeat buttons, image buttons, labels, panels, progress bars and separators. This extends the functionality of RadStatusStrip beyond the standard StatusStrip control, and gives extra flexibility in designing your application;
  • Vertical or horizontal orientation - You can specify the way the RadStatusStrip is oriented on the page, i.e. Horizontal (default) or Vertical. When Orientation is set, its value determines the flow of the root group as well.

  

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• Message Box

  Telerik MessageBox is a skinable and fully customizable modal dialog box, based on RadForm for Windows Forms. Since it offers a static Show method similar to MessageBox.Show, there is no learning curve involved, meaning that you can start using it right away. It contains all elements you will find in the standard Message Box, such as a system icon, a set of buttons, and a brief application-specific message, to help you easily create and display prompt dialogs, status information, error messages, and so much more.

  

  Some of the advantages to using RadMessageBox over MessageBox are:

  • Auto-sizing - RadMessageBox determines its size according to the message text, title and buttons used;
  • Various button layouts - you could choose from the same standard button layouts coming from the standard MessageBox class;
  • Copy to clipboard with Ctrl+C command.

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• About Box

  Telerik AboutBox is an enhanced and themable version of the regular AboutBox. It needs a little extra code to access the assembly you are running, but will display all that information automatically in the about box along with an icon.

  

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• Visual Studio Form Templates

  There are several Visual Studio templates that install with RadControls for WinForms which let you add Telerik forms to your application with little to no coding:

  • RadForm template;
  • ShapedForm template;
  • RadRibbonForm tempalate;
  • RadAboutBox tempalate.

  The templates can be located in the Add New Form dialog in either VS2005 or VS2008.

  

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• Appearance

  All Telerik Forms are shipped with rich set of themes that allow you to easily build slick interfaces with the look-and-feel of Windows Vista, Office 2007, Outlook, etc. The themes can be easily switched using a single property.

  In addition to the built-in themes, all RadControls for WinForms come with a feature we call Theme Color Blending, which allows for tweaking the color scheme of a theme, without the need to redo the theme from scratch. The updated color scheme is applied to all Telerik WinForms controls that you are using in your application for a fresh new look. Or you can build a new theme from scratch to fit your exact visual demands by using the Visual Style Builder productivity tool.

  

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• Localization and Right-to-Left Language Support

  Telerik Forms (excl. RadRibbonForm) offer full support for Right-to-Left languages and localization. See Localization and Right-to-Left Support for the full list of Telerik WinForms controls supporting RTL languages and localization.

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