We expect to ship our next major update - v20.1 - in May 2020.
Among new WinForms features we'll include in this update is Hot-Track Row Highlighting
support for our award-winning WinForms Data Grid and our WinForms TreeList.
As we'll demonstrate shortly, Hot-Track Row Highlighting will help you deliver a more
refined user experience to your end-users - and do so without unnecessary work, aggravation,
or code.
To help demonstrate the flexibility of this new feature, I'm going to use our WinForms
Data Grid demo - a sample app that ships as part of our standard WinForms distribution.
So, what is Hot-Track Row Highlighting and how will you benefit from it when using our
WinForms Data Grid or our TreeList.
As you can see on-screen, hot-track highlighting allows you to visually inform users of the
mouse cursor's hover position within the grid's or treelist's container.
As users move the mouse within the container, our grid and treelist controls automatically
paint the background of the row beneath the cursor using a muted highlight color.
This effect helps differentiate rows and should help make it easier for users to locate desired
records in large lists.
Hot-Track Row Highlighting has been engineered to fully support DevExpress application themes
and our skin engine.
When you or a user changes a skin, hot-track highlighting will adapt automatically.
For instance, if I were to change this app's skin from Office 2019 Colorful to Office 2019
Black, the muted row highlight color used within the grid will change immediately.
If we switch to a more advanced skin like Bezier and then select a unique color palette
such as red and black, the muted row highlight color will once again change automatically.
Very cool.
Now - Let's quickly discuss how you enable Hot-Track Row Highlighting.
As I mentioned a moment ago, we've made it super easy to enable this feature via a single
option inside your grid or treelist view.
Since I'm using our grid to demonstrate this feature, I simply set EnableAppearanceHotTrackedRow
to true - that's it.
Of course, we've done our best to select appropriate highlight colors for all our skins- colors
that preserve UI uniformity across all DevExpress WinForms themes.
But we did not stop there.
Since some of our customers have unique business requirements, we've made certain to give you
total control over foreground and background colors used for this new feature.
Let me uncomment these two lines of code to demonstrate the possibilities available to
you in this regard.
As you can see, I've now set Appearance.HotTrackedRow.ForeColor to DimGray and Appearance.HotTrackedRow.BackColor
to Azure.
This change overrides our default highlight color skin.
If I return to our app and select Office 2019 Black, foreground and background colors are
now different.
We hope this level of flexibility will give everyone the control necessary to deliver
optimized user experiences for a variety of usage scenarios.
Before I leave this topic - A note of caution on custom foreground and background colors.
If you do decide to manually control highlight color, keep in mind that your change is static
and will not adapt dynamically when end-users select a different skin or color palette.
For instance, though Azure and DimGray might look great for our Office 2019 Black skin,
they won't look so great when using Office 2019 White.
This is a moot point if you do not allow users to change application skins, but I still want
to make sure you are aware of its impact.
So if you are using a single theme, feel free to customize the highlight color as you see
fit...If you give users the option to select a skin or palette, you should consider the
impact of custom colors.
I hope you've enjoyed this short tutorial on Hot-Tracked Row Highlighting for our WinForms
Grid.
Remember, this capability is available in our TreeList - setup is just as pain free
for those using our WinForms Tree List component within their desktop apps.
As always, if you liked this video, please give us a thumbs up.
If you have questions, please comment below.
Please remember to subscribe to this channel for more great DevExpress videos.