Pixata custom controls for Lightswitch - Visual Studio Marketplace

Mr Yossu (sometimes known as Alan Silver to people who ought to know him better) is an aging software developer who occasionally wakes up for long enough to write code. Some of this even works!

Pixata Custom Controls For Lightswitch

These controls are now open source!!

Due to my continued lack of enthusiasm over the way Lightswitch is going (see this blog post for more details), I'm not actively developing the controls any more. However, as there still seems to be quite a lot of interest in them, I have decided to make them open source.

If you are interested in contributing, please see the GitHub pages for the latest version of the controls.

Please note that despite what it says above, this version DOES support VS2013. Please let me know if you have any problems with it.

Note that you may need to uninstall the current version and reinstall to get VS2013 to notice.

What Is This Anyway?

As a huge fan of Microsoft Visual Studio Lightswitch, and a compulsive fiddler, I developed these controls to expand the possibilities of what can be done with Lightswitch, without having to resort to any more code that absolutely possible. Whilst there are some very clever bits of code around, many of them are far too complex for a lot of Lightswitch users, and many of them are just more complex than they probably need to be.

I wrote these controls, partly for my own interest (I love experimenting with new technology), partly to make my own development easier, and partly in response to requests from other people. The common factor is that they should hopefully take some of the pain away from Lightswitch development, leaving you more time to concentrate on what's important.

The Controls In The Collection

You can see the full documentation on my blog, or go straight to the individual control documentation by clicking the links below:

Application Information - Display your application name and version number (set in the Lightswitch properties window) on a screen without writing any code.
Dividers - Add horizontal or vertical divider lines to section off your screen.
Dynamic Image Viewer and Dynamic Colour Viewer - Display icons or blocks of colour on a screen (including inside a data grid) to give a visual indication of status, etc.
Expandable Panel - Hide and display screen content to save some space.
Labelled Group - Arrange controls in a group (such as title, first name and surname), without having to label each one individually.
MailLink and WebLink - Add dynamic links so that your users can click on the screen and be taken to a web page, or start an email.
Spacer - Add some space to your Lightswitch screens
Static Image Viewer - Spiff up your user interface by displaying images on your screens without writing a single line of code.
Static Toolbar - Add a toolbar to a Lightswitch screen
Stylable Label, Stylable Static Label and Stylable TextBox - Display text in your own style, including font colour, border, drop shadow and more.
Toast - Display discrete notifications instead of annoying your users with message boxes.
Web Image and Static Web Image - Display images loaded from the web.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots, showing a few of the controls. Please click the links to see more information about each one.

On the left is a grid showing the customer status with theDynamic Image Viewer, and on the right is our old friend the elephant, displayed with theStatic Image Viewer, and the application information displayed with the Application Information control...

The Static Image Viewer and the Application Information controls

Next we have (on the left) a data grid with email addresses displayed using theMailLink, and a Notification Toast popping up in the bottom-right corner of the user's screen...

The next two screenshots show theExpandable Panel in action. First we see the top-right corner of a screen when the panel is collapsed. All you can see is the button...

The Expandable Panel in its collapsed state

This button can be changed to anything you like. When you click it, the panel expands to reveal the content...

The Expandable Panel in its expanded state

The expanded panel contains twoHorizontal Dividers (one blue, one green), a MailLink which has been set to display just the email address, and a WebLink (to the right of the "Web:" textbox) that has been set to display just the icon.