Competition Winner!

FlowFX won OpenNetCF's coding competition on visually stunning user interfaces. The source code is available below and also at the competition page.

FlowFX is a library to help .NET compact framework developers more easily create applications which require multiple forms. Basically it helps you to navigate through a bunch of forms by providing Forward, Back and BackHome functions. This isn't a trivial problem to solve, for example if you use a task switcher to change forms then the z order can get messed up so when you close a form it might show you the wrong one, also if your users are using itask or handy switcher then if they go 4 forms deep you don't really want it to show every form in your application, you probably just want one entry in itask for your app. So these are a few things the library solves so you don't need to think about it. Also, in making this form navigator library it seemed a cool idea to have a bunch of effects when you switch forms, so far I've implemented slide, flip and fall down. You can see flip in the video below. What I'm doing in the video is pressing enter on a access point row in the list. The form you see which flips up is eventually going to show details about that particular access point and allow you to connect, a feature many people have requested.As well as using it in WiFiFoFum, I'll be putting the library in the new developer section of the website pretty soon so anyone else can play about with it or use it as they wish. Its as simple as calling FlowNavigator.Forward(new ConnectForm(), new PfFlipEffect()) so I think alot of people will like it. You can also do FlowNavigator.Back() and FlowNavigator.Home().

Sample Application

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This is a test application which demonstrates Flip, Fall and Slide effects and also the Form navigation code. Its similar to what you see in the video below, except it has been modified to use PocketFrog for the animations.

Source Code

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The test application solution is Samples/FlowTest/FlowTest.sln Please email us any feedback or if you would like to discuss using it in your commercial software. You will need Visual Studio 2005, CF SP2 and both of the WM6 SDKs. Note: when you install CF2 SP2 it will ask you to remove your old CF2 first via add/remove programs - so check that you do remove Microsoft Compact Framework 2 and not full .NET 2.0 because they look quite similar in the list.

Demo Video




System Requirements


Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003, WM5 or WM6 and Smartphone WM5, WM6 (Basically any device which the .NET Compact Framework 2 can be installed on)
Compact Framework 2 (Included on your WM6 device)