How can I create a Delphi TSpeedButton or SpeedButton in C# 2.0?

Question

How can I create a Delphi TSpeedButton or SpeedButton in C# 2.0?

Answer 1

Does this help? Looks like you would have to handle the OnPaint event, and not take focus...

Answer 2

The regular .net 2.0 button supports part of what a TSpeedbutton Does:

• The Glyph: Image
• Flat : FlatStyle

It does not handle:

• Down
• Group

These two are related, you could inherit from the button, and ownerdraw it, adding Down and Group features.

Codeproject has an example of ownerdraw buttons.

Answer 3

I'm wondering if you want to create a control like a TSpeedButton, or you just need same kind of end result ...

Programming one from scratch is certainly possible, but I'd only tackle that as a learning exercise.

Assuming you want to achieve a similar end result ...

Delphi's TSpeedButton had a differences from the standard TButton that developers found useful - it was flat, didn't take focus, and it consumed fewer resources than a regular button (because it didn't have an underlying Windows Handle).

Which of these are important to you?

If you just want a flat button that doesn't accept focus, use a regular Button with FlatStyle=Flat (or PopUp) and TabStop=false. You can configure a glyph by setting either the Image property, or a combination of ImageList and ImageIndex/ImageKey.

An alternative to this would be to look for an existing button component that comes close to your needs - one place to look might be the Krypton Toolkit (free to use, see http://www.componentfactory.com/toolkit_buttoncontrols.php).

If you're wanting to reduce the number of resources consumed by your application, it's likely you'll get a better return looking elsewhere.

Back in the days of Windows 3.1 (Delphi 1) and Windows 95 (Delphi 2), the number of available handles was strictly limited, with a maximum number available system wide. Today, with Windows XP and Vista, the number of available handles is far far higher, and the number is per process, not system wide. Unless you're creating thousands upon thousands of buttons, you're very unlikely to come anywhere close to running out.

Answer 4

Bevan, Thanks for the answer

Eric

Answer 5

Using a Button and setting the TabStop property to false only works when tapping through the form...

If you need (as I did) a button that does not get selected when clicking on it, there is only one way I have found to do it.

The way I did it, was to subclass the Button class and in the constructor calling the SetStyles and thereby setting Selectable to false, like so:

public class ButtonNoFocus : Button
{
    public ButtonNoFocus()
        : base()
    {
        base.SetStyle(ControlStyles.Selectable, false);
    }
}

This worked out for me, and is perfect if you e.g. have a control-panel with buttons that perform actions to a selected object...