Drinks before Movies

In an attempt to introduce people to other people, I'll be in the Filmhouse bar from 10pm tomorrow. If you're coming to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at 11pm then please feel free to turn up at 10 and have a drink.

Snaplines on Custom Controls

Note - originally written for our internal .Net discussion forum. I wanted to archive it somewhere public so that I could find it again later. Because frankly the MS documentation sucks ass.

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You may have noticed that when you create a custom usercontrol it doesn't come with a "text" snapline. Which makes it very hard to align labels, etc. to it using the IDE.

There is a simple way to do so, but if it's documented anywhere by MS then I'm darned if I could find it. I did eventually track down a way of doing so, which worked for me without any problems.

If you create a usercontrol called "MyUserControl", then you need to go into its code and add a designer attribute above the class declaration like so:

[Designer(typeof(SnaplineControlDesigner))]
public partial class MyUserControl1 : UserControl
{
   public MyUserControl1()
   {
      InitializeComponent();
   }
}

You'll then need to create a SnaplineControlDesigner that looks like this:

public class SnaplineControlDesigner : ControlDesigner
{
   public override IList SnapLines
   {
      get
      {
         Control control = this.Component as Control;
         ArrayList snapLines = base.SnapLines as ArrayList;
         snapLines.Add(
         new SnapLine(SnapLineType.Baseline, control.Height - 4, SnapLinePriority.Medium));
         return snapLines;
      }
   }
}

Which, as you can see, uses its pointer to the original control to get the control's height and then place the snapline 4 pixels up. Obviously, if you want it to be 5,7 or 23 pixels up, then you can simply change that.