TextBox with Cue/Prompt

The Moth - TextBox with cue banner support for Windows Mobile

"When talking about TextBox with cue banner I thought I had done a good job at the end of the post of hinting that someone should write a pure managed version; a version that is not restricted to Windows Vista, but rather would work on WindowsCE/WindowsMobile devices (via the .NET Compact Framework of course).

Since nobody stepped up, I thought I’d tackle it myself :-). I have to say that what I thought would be a 10 minute job ended up taking 6 times as long and right about now I give up as what I have is good enough and a nice starter for someone else to take and polish, iron out any issues etc.

..."

I thought Daniel’s code to provide cues/prompts to a textbox was pretty cool.

Though he started it was for WinCE/Mobile, I wanted the same feature for my WinXP WinForm apps. In looking at the code, I didn’t see any reason it wouldn’t work...

So this morning, after a little bit of work (mostly due to converting it to VB.Net, the programming language I dream in...) I had a working TextBox control with cue support on WinXP (no reason it shouldn’t work on other Windows platforms either). After a little additional work to add designer SmartTag support and property attributes, I have myself a cool little textbox.

That will add a nice bit usability to my apps.

The next step is to convert it to an Extender so the same functionality can be used across a number of different controls. That I’ll leave for another day...

Now to see if I can get permission to post the code somewhere [long deep "I hate IP issues and contracts" sigh]...