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handyorg/handycontrol

★ 7,044C#Audience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A collection of polished, ready-to-use interface components for Windows desktop apps built with WPF (C#), including a color picker, flip clock, animated GIF support, and a property grid not found in the default toolkit.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((handycontrol))
    What It Does
      WPF UI components
      Polished controls
      Color picker
      Flip clock
    Tech Stack
      C#
      .NET 4.0 plus
      WPF
      NuGet
    Use Cases
      Desktop app UI
      Property editors
      Animated GIF display
      Custom layouts
    Audience
      C# developers
      Windows desktop devs
      WPF projects
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Add a color picker to a WPF desktop app without building one from scratch.

USE CASE 2

Display an animated GIF inside a Windows desktop application.

USE CASE 3

Show and edit object properties in a panel using a built-in property grid component.

USE CASE 4

Build a WPF app with more polished controls than the default Microsoft toolkit provides.

Tech stack

C#.NETWPFNuGetVisual Studio

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Requires Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 4.0 or higher, primary documentation is in Chinese.

In plain English

HandyControl is a library of ready-made interface components for building Windows desktop applications using WPF, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF is a Microsoft framework that C# developers use to create desktop programs with windows, buttons, dialogs, and other visual elements. Rather than building every interface piece from scratch, developers can pull in this library and get a collection of pre-built controls that are more polished or have features not included in the default WPF toolkit. The library includes components like a color picker (so users can visually select a color), a flip clock display, a property grid (for showing and editing object properties in a panel), animated GIF support, and layout controls like a relative panel. These are the kinds of interface elements that appear frequently in desktop software but that WPF does not provide out of the box, or provides only in a basic form. Installation is through NuGet, the standard package manager for .NET projects. The library requires .NET version 4.0 or higher and is built with the latest C# version. Development is done in Visual Studio 2022. The project has a strong Chinese-language community and the primary documentation is in Chinese, hosted at handyorg.github.io/handycontrol. An English README is available in the repository but the documentation site is in Chinese. The repository is also mirrored on Gitee, which is a Chinese code hosting platform similar to GitHub. There is a Slack group for Chinese-speaking users. The project has attracted contributions from many developers over time. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to add a HandyControl color picker to my WPF window in C# with minimal setup.
Prompt 2
How do I display an animated GIF using HandyControl in a WPF application?
Prompt 3
Give me a code example for using HandyControl's property grid to display editable object properties in a WPF panel.
Prompt 4
What HandyControl components are most useful for a settings dialog in a WPF desktop app?
Prompt 5
How do I install HandyControl via NuGet and reference it in an existing WPF project?
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