Tools for WinForms

Overview

Several powerful productivity tools are included in the Telerik Windows Forms suite to assist you in your development. Some of them are: a Visual Style Builder that allows you to codelessly customize component appearance, a Control Spy that helps you examine and change properties at run time, and a Shape Editor you can use to define free-form UI elements for advanced interfaces.

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Features

Visual Style Builder for UI Customization
In addition to the standard methods of user interface customization through property settings and code writing, the Telerik RadControls for WinForms suite includes an innovative Visual Style Builder for easy, point-and-click customization of skins and themes for the RadControlsfor WinForms suite. This tool, which runs as a stand alone utility, gives designers and developers alike a flexible way for building stylesheets for completely codeless customization of control appearance and behavior.

The Visual Style Builder gives you the freedom to reuse your work by letting you create new themes, tweak existing themes, and save themes. It features a Style Repository, which saves your styles and enablesyou to reuse them on other controls, an industry first! Suppose you have developed a custom theme for RadTabStrip that has particular colors, fonts, mouseover behavior, and so on. By saving these settings into an XML theme file, you can then reuse them onto every control in your application, which frees you from the repetitive work of recreating styles for multiple controls. Read more.
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Control Spy Tool for Easier Development

The Control Spy is a tool that lets you examine the detailed internal structure of any Telerik RadControl at run-time. It is not a stand-alone tool. Rather, the Control Spy is supplied as part of a library that you compile into your application. After adding this library, you can start the Control Spy and use it to examine and alter the properties of any Telerik RadControl currently running, providing you with extra control over development and design.

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Shape Editor for Free-Form Designs

The Shape Editor is used to create curved free-form designs for your UI elements on an integrated drawing surface. There is no code involved, keeping the design as simple as possible. The Windows Forms Shape Editor by Telerik supports Bezier curves as well, for complete control over the element's appearance.

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Project Upgrade Utility

We take care of your upgrade needs, so you do not have to. The Project Update Utility helps you migrate your existing RadControls for WinForms project to newer versions of RadControls for WinForms in an instant, taking care of all updates to project and GAC references at once. The project upgrades are effortless and trouble-free as never before.

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Element Hierarchy Editor

When dealing with complex control types that have multiple nested elements, such as a Telerik Windows Forms RibbonBar control, you would appreciate the ability to set properties at multiple levels of the class hierarchy. Since all Telerik Windows Forms controls inherit from one or more base classes it is also helpful to be able to easily see the classes in the control hierarchy so you can set the properties on the appropriate class.
This is where the Element Hierarchy Editor comes into place. It allows you to work with complex control types and to navigate the class and element hierarchy direclty in Visual Studio design time. Control's properties can be viewed or changed direclty through the editor and the changes are persisted to the appropriate property settings in the designer.

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Property Builders in Visual Studio design time

The Property Builders allow you to quickly create and arrange the structure and appearance of RadGridView and RadTreeView. The Property Builders are invoked from the Smart Tag in design-time, and provide an easy and intuitive UI for the most common actions when working with the control, including direct access to the most common properties.
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