Task Dialogs in C#

This is called Task Dialog and its a part of WindowsAPICodePack, available for download from http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack/

 

What we're going to do in this article is to create a Task Dialog with customizable texts and a hyperlink that opens your webpage using Process.

The application will look like this(its a localized Windows 7 by the way):

 

 

First of all, create a new windows forms application.

 

Then add these references:

 

Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.dll

 

which can be found on your extracted archive after you downloaded it:

 

..\Windows API Code Pack 1.1\Windows API Code Pack 1.1\binaries\Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.dll

 

After that create a TaskDialogCommandLink variable:

TaskDialogCommandLink link = null;

This will help us to access it from another event to open your website.

 

Now let's keep going...

 

Create a TaskDialog variable

TaskDialog dia = new TaskDialog();

This is the Dialog Window we wish to create. Here we created it actually

 

Let's play with its properties by adding more functionality to it:

dia.Cancelable = true;
dia.InstructionText = "Friend Request";
dia.StandardButtons = TaskDialogStandardButtons.Yes | TaskDialogStandardButtons.No;

Cancelable means we can close/cancel the dialog if we want.

 

InstructionText is the above text inside the dialog. You can give it a general name like Friend Request, Mail Sent, Password Changed, and goes on...

 

StandardButtons are as you can see, added two of them; Now lets play with CommandLink:

link = new TaskDialogCommandLink("http://www.iersoy.com","Anonymous just added you as Friend in Facebook!","Do you accept?");
link.UseElevationIcon = true;
link.Enabled = true;
link.Click+=new EventHandler(link_Click);

Here we created a Hyperlink alike structure that uses the Elevation icon and raised an event when clicked on it

public void link_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Process.Start(link.Name);
}

as I told you before we created commandlink to access an event. That event is this Click event. We access links' names to view them on a web browser. I added my own blog, you can change it later, depends on you.

 

And lets finalize this application:

dia.Controls.Add(link);
dia.DetailsExpanded = false;
dia.DetailsExpandedText = "Annonymous is a world-wide hacktivist group";
dia.ExpansionMode = TaskDialogExpandedDetailsLocation.ExpandFooter;
dia.Caption = "Information!";
dia.Show();

We're adding this link to Task Dialog so that we can see it. We also assign false to DetailsExpanded to make it look like real windows 7 Task Dialogs. And we're adding some text regarding information about Anonymous.it displays when you expand the detail icon

 

And finally, we show it to the user:

 

Run and you'll see a similar effective shown as a screenshot above

 

Hope it helps, and you use it in your applications.