Common Features

• Apr 05, 2023
• 3 minutes to read

In this section, you will find information on features that are shared by all or some DevExpress Windows Forms controls.

• Application Appearance and Skin Colors

  This section describes how to bring your app to the next level of perfection, using rich appearance customization techniques and various application skins.

• Data Binding Common Concepts

  Contains information on binding to various data sources, using unbound mode, running the Data Source Configuration Wizard, applying Data Annotation attributes, etc.

• Data Source Wizard

  Contains information on the Data Source Wizard pages and the API available for their customization.

• High DPI Support

  Contains information on building DPI-aware applications using DevExpress controls and components. Learn about controls and control properties that make High DPI support easy.

• HTML and CSS Support

  This is an entirely new approach to WinForms app design. HTML & CSS Support allows you to create fully custom UI elements and eliminate the use of property-based UI customizations and CustomDraw events.

• Expressions

  See topics in this section to learn about expressions used to create unbound columns/fields, build filter criteria at design time and by end-users at runtime, and to create expression-based conditional formatting.

• Behaviors

  Attach a Behavior to target controls and components in order to template them in a specific manner. For instance, a Clock Behavior turns a LabelControl or a digital gauge into a clock.

• Filtering UI Context

  Describes the Filtering UI Context component that enables you to automatically build a UI to filter your data. For instance, it can help you emulate a side filtering menu similar to those seen in online stores, used to narrow the search for products.

• Formatting Values

  Covers approaches to shape and format data before it is displayed onscreen.

• HTML Text Formatting

  Certain controls allow you to format their display text using HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This section shows the controls that support HTML text formatting and describes the available HTML formatting tags.

• Menus

  Many DevExpress Windows Forms controls provide their own context menus. See this section to learn about customizing these menus.

• Tooltips

  Tooltips are supported for almost all DevExpress Windows Forms controls. Use the DefaultToolTipController and ToolTipController components to assign and customize them. For compound controls that consist of multiple elements, tooltips can be displayed for each of these elements. This section shows how to specify tooltips for DevExpress and third-party controls, how to manage tooltips in a centralized way, and how to specify tooltips for control elements that do not initially have tooltips.

• Saving and Restoring Layouts to a File, Stream and System Registry

  DevExpress Windows Forms controls allow their layouts to be saved and then restored. Layouts contain settings that determine how the control’s elements behave, their size, position, etc. Once saved, a layout can be applied to any control of the same type. This allows you and your end-users to customize a control, save its layout and later apply the saved settings to this or other controls.

• Clipboard

  When copying data from the Data Grid and Tree List controls to the Clipboard, you can enable the formatting settings to be copied along with data. Thus, when pasting this data later to a destination application (e.g., MS Word, Excel, and Outlook), the source formatting is applied.