combining (something like) Flash in a windows form application

Question

I know this is a place where people ask advice for designing code. I am at a bit strange side on my coding quest, on one side people send me design stuff. Special graphics and ideas on how they should be shown in a program workflow.

(i think the marketing designers are a bit to powerfull in this project They tend to think here that their pictures are the program itself, but all that coding still has to be written still ..by me in 1 week.. )

They want tweans of graphics and rotation etc.. Well in short this reminded me of things i have seen in flash But flash is for the web, as far as i know. But i think.. those people most likely use Adobe software so might safe it as some Adobe flash formats. In the end it is all about a interface for a machine Because of some hardware limits, i need to do it all in .net 2 on normal win forms. And on slow PC hardware (no direct10 or so).. directX is to much for me to finish in 1 week anyway

Now i was thinking would it be possible to run flash on a form, or what would be something close the the Flash Experience ..you know text tweens/ slide ins etc something that could be combined with C# ?.

Answer 1

If you use Windows Presentation Foundation, it is a core part of the .NET framework from version 3.5. In short, it allows you to pretty much do all the things in flash, including tweening and rotating as you've said.

The other alternative is to embed the Flash ActiveX component and load an SWF.

EDIT to add: I just saw you wrote .NET2 - WPF requires .NET 3.5, however the core runtime is still the same as version 2. If you can't upgrade to 3.5 then Flash might be your only option.

Answer 2

If you want to use Flash, you can pull in an ActiveX component of it into a .NET Form (though IIRC you need to get the ActiveX Flash installer to get that component and the installer is somewhat difficult to find on Adobe's website) then you could program things in Flex (if you don't have Flash handy). There's not much documentation that I've been able to find on this ActiveX component though.

As for similar things in .NET itself, I'm not too familiar with that area of .NET, so I'm afraid I can't help you there.

Answer 3

As Sam mentioned, one option for graphically rich UI is to use WPF. You get animations, custom styles and a lot of other features at a much lower cost than trying to do the same in Winforms.

The other is using Adobe AIR which is basically Flash for the desktop.