I’ve written a couple of new ones for use in my applications. They’re fairly small, so I’ve made them available<\/a> if anyone else wants to use them with their apps. <\/p>\n In this post, I’ll quickly outline what is wrong with the standard dialogs, and introduce my new ones. <\/p>\n Let’s start with the “file open” dialog. <\/p>\n It dumps all of the files from all the directories in one place for you to choose from – with one column in the table used to tell you which folder each file came from. <\/p>\n This means that (as soon as you’ve got a reasonable number of files on your PDA) you get a massive delay when this dialog is opened, while it populates it’s table. <\/p>\n The table ends up with so many things in it that the scroll bar gets really small, and impossible to use without a stylus. Even with the stylus, navigating through all your files in one lump is slow and fiddly.<\/p>\n And worst of all, it only finds files in your root directory, or one directory deep. Any files in subdirectories deeper than this are not included.<\/p>\n This means that even after you waste your time hunting through a ton of files you aren’t interested in, you find that the files you did want aren’t there.<\/p>\n Which normally means going into “File Explorer”, and moving the file you want to find higher up the directory tree so you can get to it.<\/p>\n Rubbish.<\/p>\n The save dialog isn’t much better. <\/p>\n Again, your choices for the folder to store a file is limited to “None” (which, confusingly, doesn’t mean save in the root folder – it means save in “My Documents”<\/em>) or the top level directories in “My Documents” (like “My Pictures”, or “My Music”). <\/p>\n Just don’t choose “My Documents”, because then it saves it in If you want to create a new folder… erm… you can’t. Well – you can start up File Explorer and create it at the top level so it is accessible to the Save dialog.<\/p>\n Argh. <\/p>\n You can see why people were hacked off with my apps… who can blame them?<\/p>\n The new dialogs<\/strong><\/p>\n They let you navigate the folder structure on your device in a traditional file explorer type way. <\/p>\n Each level is only populated when you expand that folder in the tree view – meaning that you don’t have to wait for your PDA to slowly traverse it’s whole filesystem before the dialog is usable. <\/p>\n Apps using these dialogs can set a flag to say whether a user has to pick from existing files \/ directories, or use the dialog to identify a new file \/ directory to create.<\/p>\n And they can be called in pretty much the same way as the standard .NET FileDialogs. <\/p>\n Simple. But oh, so much more usable!<\/p>\n See it in use<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ve already added it to my wiki<\/a> and my notepad<\/a> apps, and will be adding it to others soon.<\/p>\n If you want a copy for your Windows Mobile app, you can download the DLL<\/a> for including as a reference in your Visual Studio project, or download the source<\/a> and make any improvements that you need.<\/p>\n Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Windows Mobile – like standard Windows – has a default “file open” and a “file save” dialog that all applications can use. If you’re writing an app, you can use it in your code with just a few lines. Great! Except… no. Because they’re rubbish. This has come up as an issue raised with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[20,33,571,31,29,21,28,32,30,22,19],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","tag-net","tag-netcf","tag-code","tag-dialog","tag-directory","tag-dotnet","tag-file","tag-forms","tag-save","tag-visual-studio","tag-windows-mobile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Windows](\"post-images\/071120-existing-open.jpg\")
The standard Open dialog<\/strong><\/p>\n|\r\n+--- Directory 1\r\n| |\r\n| +--- files here \r\n| +--- are included\r\n|\r\n+--- Directory 2\r\n| |\r\n| +--- so are these\r\n|\r\n+--- Directory 3\r\n| |\r\n| +--- this is accessible\r\n| |\r\n| +--- Directory 4\r\n| | |\r\n| | +--- files here \r\n| | +--- are not \r\n| | +--- included\r\n| | |\r\n| | +--- Directory 5\r\n| | |\r\n| | +--- not accessible\r\n| |<\/code><\/pre>\n![\"Windows](\"post-images\/071120-existing-save.jpg\")
The standard Save dialog<\/strong><\/p>\n\\My Documents\\My Documents\\<\/code><\/p>\n![\"new](\"post-images\/071120-file.jpg\")
The new dialogs are fairly simple. They come in two flavours – one for files and one for directories. <\/p>\nFileDialogX dlg = new FileDialogX();\r\ndlg.AllowNewFiles = false;\r\n\r\nDialogResult result = dlg.ShowDialog();\r\nif (result == DialogResult.OK)\r\n{\r\n \/\/ filename in:\r\n \/\/ dlg.FileName;\r\n}\r\n\r\ndlg.Dispose();<\/code><\/pre>\n