Hi, I'm designing a GUI application in C#.NET. Look at the image below. It's a screen shot of Acronis TrueHome. I find its interface very appealing and would like to create something similar in my own application: I particularly like the sidebar. It's the same thing you find in Vista's control panel, among other places. Also have a look at this screen shot of Trillian: It's similar, but also very appealing. Can these interfaces be made in .NET? What controls are they using in the side bars? Thanks.

I'm not sure how the sidebars are made, probably done by hand to look like Windows'. But the main panel is probably done using HTML. I think there is a .NET component which renders HTML, probably in the same way as IE (and using IE's rendering engine).

I would guess it's either a custom control, or the WebBrowser control. I've used the WebBrowser control (which is just a wrapper around the IE ActiveX control) and it's pretty simple. Certainly it would be much simpler than writing a custom control.

I can't speak for those applications, but those panels in Vista's Explorer are implemented using a custom UI framework.

You could probably create similar UI using Panels and Buttons with custom drawing.

If you're using just regular .net windows forms then it's a bunch of custom work. You may be able to find some control packs out there with similar things. If you're using WPF it may be much easier to come up with similar appearance on your own.

Your top image in wpf would just be a three styled Expander controls containing probably a styled listbox. Bottom image could probably just be done with a heavily styled list.

Ah, I have heard of WPF before. I'd love to try it out, but my C# express is crapping out on me as soon as I try to create a WPF project ("Microsoft.visualstudio.xaml has failed to load properly". Other people have the same issue, but it looks like the workaround is a complete reinstall of pretty much all Microsoft developer tools, which I'm not willing to do with a looming deadline.)

I'm curious about a couple things with regard to WPF.

1: I love winforms and .NET because it's so easy to slap together a decent looking GUI with so little effort. What about WPF? I know the results look far, far better -- but does it also take significantly more effort? What are your recommendations on winforms vs WPF, especially for the future?

2: To be honest, I never formally "learned" how to use .NET and the Visual Studio designer for forms. Given experience in other languages and GUI frameworks, the learning curve was essentially non-existent, and whatever I didn't know, I could verify with a quick web search. Will I be able to get away with this attitude if I decide to go with WPF? Or does WPF require more effort to use properly?

Sorry to derail my own thread, but I am curious! Thanks.

Codeproject has this and this. The rest looks like it could be accomplished with a few custom controls and perhaps a few overloaded paint functions.