Visual Toolchest

All Visual Toolchest functions are defined in the PPJ.Runtime.Vis class as static methods. The names are all unchanged, with the Vis prefix being the name of the class: VisStrPad() is Vis.StrPad(). Also all the supported Visual Toolchest controls are declared in PPJ.Runtime.Vis. The names of the controls have been normalized to Vis<Name>. Ice Porter changes the names automatically while porting: cColorCombBox is ported to VisColorComboBox.

All Visual Toolchest controls are directly derived from either PPJ controls (which are directly derived from .NET controls) or from .NET controls. Extended controls like the calendar or the outline control in the Visual Toolchest library are implemented extending the equivalent .NET controls, which are implemented in .NET as wrapper to the common controls library.

Unsupported functions

There are no unsupported public functions for the Visual Toolchest library.

However some SAL code may use undocumented functions that were not intended to be used directly and are not supported in the PPJ Framework.

Unsupported controls

All Visual Toolchest controls are supported.

However some extended controls may behave a bit differently or may have some limitations because we use the standard .NET implementation of common controls. The following table shows the equivalence between custom VT controls and Windows common controls:

Visual Toolchest control
Equivalent .NET control (from Windows Common Controls)

cRichEdit

RichTextBox

cOutlineListBox

TreeView

cDesktopListBox

TreeView

cDirListBox

TreeView

cDirTreeListBox

TreeView

cListView

ListView

cCalendar

MonthCalendar

cCalendarDropDown

DateTimePicker

Unsupported styles

Some Visual Toolchest controls support a number of style constants that alter the behavior of the control. Most of the styles have a direct correspondence to Windows Common Controls styles and are supported in the PPJ Framework. The table below lists the style correspondence.

Control
Supported VT styles
Equivalent property

TreeView

LBS_KillFocusNoSelect

LBS_ShowHorzScrollBar

LBS_ShowNoTree

LBS_ShowSelectText

LBS_Explorer

LBS_DisableNoScroll

HideSelection

HorizontalScrollbar (only for VisOutlineListBox)

ShowLines

FullRowSelect

ShowPlusMinus

Scrollable

ComboBox

None

None

ListBox

LBS_NoAutoResize

IntegralHeight

The original SAL application may try to apply VT style LBS_VisExtensions to controls that are not derived from VT classes. This is not supported in the PPJ Framework because it's an internal feature of the VT library used to subclass the control. When reading the styles of a VT derived class, the LBS_VisExtensions value is automatically added by the PPJ Framework to the return value.

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