Rapid Layout .NET

Overview

Rapid Layout is an enhancement to the Visual Studio Forms designer. It accelerates development of Windows Forms user interfaces (UIs). With its unique combination of connectors, springs, guides and alignment groups the UI will be functional, perfectly aligned, and resizable.

The alignment of the UI will remain consistent with and change to the font style, form size and language. Rapid Layout gives the person designing the user interface freedom to either precisely place UI components or to graphically create simple constraints that direct the Rapid Layout engine. Based on these constraints the engine will automatically rearrange the UI on changes.

Using Rapid Layout empowers the UI designer to quickly build forms the way they envisioned. This speed and flexibility will ultimately save time and money.

Accelerate development

Visual Studio users will build user Interfaces faster with Rapid Layout. They can create perfectly aligned forms without having to spend time making sub panels or nested user controls. It will take less time to add new user interface components to an existing form without having to manually realign everything. For those creating user interfaces in multiple languages they will save time because Rapid Layout will realign all the components to fit any change in text length.

Perfectly aligned

Rapid Layout has a choice of alignment techniques that improve the visual appearance of windows forms. Connectors are used to permanently join user interface components together. Vertical and horizontal guides are used to create spacial arrangements that are similar but more flexible than table layouts. Alignment groups are used to ensure that collections of components such as buttons are aligned or are the same size.

Freedom

Although Rapid Layout can be used to control the placement of user interface components it still enables the Visual Studio user full control whenever necessary. Components can be either freely placed or aligned to any other component or group of components. When guides are used then user interface designer can choose to align against the guides or to any other components on the form.

Resizable

The Rapid Layout engine recalculates the size and spacing of all the user interface components when forms are resized, font styles change or the language is switched. This ensures that the desired alignment is maintained. A user can make the form larger to cause text boxes or viewing panels to grow so they can see more on the forms. They can make them smaller so they can see other overlapping windows on the screen.