• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

I beg developers

S

sfrenchie

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Could you please stop using this awful control that has been around for centuries (it feels). It's so outdated, such a pain to use, when there are many other elegant solutions. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31059/how-do-you-configure-an-openfiledialog-to-select-folders

Judging by some posts on programming forums I'm not the only one thinking we should stay away from this control:
"The FolderBrowserDialog has many usability issues. I wouldn't consider actually putting it in an application. See my post for a dialog that has much better usability – Scott Wisniewski Feb 5 '09 at 3:13

The FolderBrowserDialog is a truly horrible bit of UI. – mackenir May 5 '10 at 12:47

Seriously, people, PLEASE stop putting this annoying dialog into your applications. It has VERY BAD UI as highlighted by earlier comments. – romkyns Jul 30 '10 at 20:46"

Thanks.

Untitled-1.jpg
 
S

sfrenchie

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Click and it scrolls back down...
Click and it scrolls back down...
Click and it scrolls back down...
Lovely :banghead:
 
tylerpilot

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I have to agree, it looks outdated, doesn't allow you to search for files, and is inconvenient for folders with more than about 30 files.
 
S

sfrenchie

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I have a nice tree structure for my models development however it's buried sometimes deep in subfolders. It takes forever to get to them.
On top of that you can't even paste a full path.
 
Hughes-MDflyer4

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There's absolutely no reason to use such a dialog in a modern application. They're really quite annoying to use, especially when you have to browse to the same, deep directory over and over...and over, and over again, and over again (even more so when you can't type the path by hand). As a UI designer, I cringe every time I see people making the mistake of using these outdated things.
 
JRobinson

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I guess I'm so behind the times I don't even know what the better alternative would be? (other than pasting a path...)
 
scruffyduck

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That is an Open File Dialog, I thought you were complaining about the use of the Folder Browse Dialog or has your ire spread out to all stock methods of accessing persistent storage?
 
scruffyduck

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sfrenchie said:
Best replacement, only 2 files to include in projects: http://www.lyquidity.com/devblog/?p=136
Click to expand...

Actually the 'same code' is available in several places and there are several ways to do it. There seems to be a bit of plagiarism going on ;)

This is another one that contains a number of Vista based dialogs as well as the folder browse one and is a single library: http://www.ookii.org/Software/Dialogs/

Also this one: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18078/Vista-Controls
 
S

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Haha, yeah, typical of Internet, some people have no shame putting their name on someone else's code, so pitiful.
Thanks for the other links, I'm going to check them out.
 
scruffyduck

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sfrenchie said:
Haha, yeah, typical of Internet, some people have no shame putting their name on someone else's code, so pitiful.
Thanks for the other links, I'm going to check them out.
Click to expand...

The real issue is that the extended FolderBrowseDialog was introduced with Vista but not made available in .NET - why? It has been asked of the NET team at MS and we generally get mumbled answers. The underlying stuff is also sealed so we can't inherit from the damned things inside Windows either.

So some tricks need to be applied to hack into Vista (or later) to get at the new dialog. These are all pretty much the same since there is really only one hack. There is also the issue of making sure that the dialog falls back to the old style for users of XP.

A FolderBrowseDialog (or any other file dialog) is actually pretty simple to write with a form, a few buttons, and a list box or data view or two. No file dialog actually does anything other than provide the user with a way to select a path. This is returned as a string to the calling app that then needs to deal with the open, save, delete or whatever. There are some changes in ADE 1.70 that centralizes handling of all dialogs, child windows and so on. They might even appear more consistent in future ;0
 
S

sfrenchie

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I can think of one reason why such thing happens, MS has become so big that at times the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing. In other words miscommunication. There are several examples in Windows in which same things are done or presented differently probably because the two dev teams weren't aware of the specs.

The project I referenced provides for fallback. It uses reflection to "hack" into the dialog, which I understand nothing about, but it works well. I just compiled it as a class library and use it in my projects.

Thanks for the future improvements.
 
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