Recent The WinForms Notepad Project Stories

Compact

Standard

Grid

The C#/WPF/.NET Core 3 version of .NETpad is now complete and feature-comparable to its Windows Forms predecessor. So what's next?

To complete my quick-and-dirty port of .NETpad to WPF and .NET Core, I had to overcome one final obstacle: Keyboard shortcuts.

I’m delighted---and more than a bit surprised---to discover that I’m almost done porting .NETpad to WPF and .NET Core.

WPF isn't all bad. In fact, there are several niceties in this more modern framework that I really appreciate, especially XAML.

I’ve learned a lot in porting .NETpad, if partly, to the Windows Presentation Foundation and Universal Windows Platform.

The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) isn’t particularly well-suited to traditional productivity applications.

I decided to port .NETpad from Visual Basic to C# in order to get up to speed on the latter language as quickly as possible.

For much of the past year, I’ve been researching and working with Microsoft’s previous-generation developer technologies.

Here’s a useful new feature from Microsoft Word that can be added quickly and easily to .NETpad: Word count.

Here are a few minor changes and fixes to .NETpad related to the status bar, word wrap, and app publishing.

It’s time to think about what’s next for .NETpad, a project I had originally hoped to finish up by the end of 2019.

After months of work on .NETpad’s printing functionality, I think I’ve finally arrived at a solution that works.

Today, we implement the Replace, Replace All, and Go To commands, improve the fit and finish, and change the application name.

In this quick sidetrack, I make a few changes in anticipation of the final branding of our Notepad clone. NotepadWF isn’t going to cut it.

A reader has graciously pointed me in the right direction towards solving some of the more vexing issues with this project.

Our quick and dirty Auto Save functionality was perhaps a bit too quick and too dirty. So here are some improvements.

As I struggle to duplicate some of Notepad’s more complex features, I was reminded that Notepad itself has changed a lot over the years.

As I continue to put off the really hard bits, here’s how to change the icon and add a quick and dirty auto-save feature.

This time, we’re going to clean up some code, fix some bugs, and see whether a context menu can improve the app.

With our Notepad clone getting more mature, the remaining commands are, by nature, the most difficult to implement.

I decided to take a look at adding some features that aren’t available in the real app. First up: Theme support.

As it turns out, the little code experiment we engaged in yesterday can be added to our project as-is to display the caret position.

Taking a step back for a moment, I wanted to see whether using a RichTextBox control would improve our app.

Let’s improve the scrollbars, clean up the status bar, and see what it looks like to publish our app to other computers.

After using NotePadWF extensively at Ignite 2019, I’m ready to make a few bug fixes and fit and finish improvements.

In this 11th installment of our start programming project, lets fix zoom and implement several of the Edit menu commands.

OK, I have time for two more small but fun changes: We can persist all of the user’s settings changes and add a starter About box.