Drawing

[Terry Holland]

We have an application that is written in VB that allows to users to design
some basic structures by allowing them to select items in in a Picture box
and them modify the properties of the item that they have selected.

The items that they select are generally lines of varying length & thickness
& some arrows indicating the position of various forces.

The users are very happy with the way they use the program at present, but
we would like move this program to the company intranet. We are hoping to
use this opportunity to develop our first ASP.Net application but are
wondering how to get this 'drawing' functionality from a web page.

Are there web controls that can detect the position of the mouse & possibly
allow drag & drop of items on a drawing?

Terry Holland

 

[Dmitriy Lapshin [C# / .NET MVP]]

Hi Terry,

Given your Web application will be used on the Intranet, and that you could
possibly restrict the users to using IE only, I'd suggest crafting a Windows
Forms user control that will then be hosted by a Web page. Since, in
general, you cannot do any real drawing on a Web page, I see this as the
best solution.

Now to the possible consequences:

1. All of the users will have to have the .NET Framework installed.
2. Windows Forms controls, when hosted by Internet Explorer, are granted
pretty restrictive priveleges. You should exercise care in designing such
areas of the application as accessing disk files, network connectivity or
interoperating with unmanaged code. While these priveleges can be increased,
this will have to be done on each user's machine, so if this is unwanted or
unsuitable, you are now warned.

Hope this helps.

 

[Terry Holland]

This would be okay

Can you point me to any examples of how to do this?

Hi Terry,

Given your Web application will be used on the Intranet, and that you could
possibly restrict the users to using IE only, I'd suggest crafting a Windows
Forms user control that will then be hosted by a Web page. Since, in
general, you cannot do any real drawing on a Web page, I see this as the
best solution.

Now to the possible consequences:

1. All of the users will have to have the .NET Framework installed.
2. Windows Forms controls, when hosted by Internet Explorer, are granted
pretty restrictive priveleges. You should exercise care in designing such
areas of the application as accessing disk files, network connectivity or
interoperating with unmanaged code. While these priveleges can be increased,
this will have to be done on each user's machine, so if this is unwanted or
unsuitable, you are now warned.

Hope this helps.

--
Dmitriy Lapshin [C# / .NET MVP]
X-Unity Test Studio
http://x-unity.miik.com.ua/teststudio.aspx
Bring the power of unit testing to VS .NET IDE

We have an application that is written in VB that allows to users to design
some basic structures by allowing them to select items in in a Picture box
and them modify the properties of the item that they have selected.

The items that they select are generally lines of varying length & thickness
& some arrows indicating the position of various forces.

The users are very happy with the way they use the program at present, but
we would like move this program to the company intranet. We are hoping to
use this opportunity to develop our first ASP.Net application but are
wondering how to get this 'drawing' functionality from a web page.

Are there web controls that can detect the position of the mouse & possibly
allow drag & drop of items on a drawing?

Terry Holland