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It can be quite a lot of work to support resizing, padding, different fonts, etc. when you write a WPF custom control. The main class in the library CustomControlBase provides these functionalities and also drawing directly to the screen for your custom control. A few other methods in this library are also helpful when writing WPF controls, like GlyphDrawer which allows to measure text length and writing text directly to a Control's DrawingContext.

CustomControlBase can be used for any custom control you write. CustomControlSample in CustomControlSampleLib provides a detailed example how to add Visuals, FramworkElemtens, Controls, etc. and how to directly draw to the screen can be easily combined. Left in the sample is a TextBox and right is a code drawn ellipse with the same (!) size like the TextBox. A possible use case would be a graph together with a legend.

One challenge here is the sizing and placing of the control's content, depending on Alignment (stretched or not), TextBox.FontSize and available space given by the Window. CustomControlBase and CustomControlSample also support Border and Padding. Font and BackGround are inherited in a custom control from Control, but they don't do anything out of the box. CustomControlBase adds the missing functionality.

net5.0-windows or later

The only library needed to be referenced from your own code, providing:

Base class for custom controls with functionality added for Children, drawing, Border, Padding and Background.

Writes text to a DrawingContext. Can also be used to calculate the length of text.

Contains the methods FindVisualChildren() and FindVisualChild()

The class CustomControlSample.cs shows how to use the class CustomControlBase with detailed instructions. Copy CustomControlSample code into your own custom control when you start to write it.

WPF Core application displaying CustomControlSample

Completed and stable

Copyright 2020 Jürg Peter Huber, Singapore.

Licensed under the Creative Commons 0 license