Tutorial: Removing dividing lines from your Visual Studio based Paint.NET v5.0 Plugin!

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Tutorial: Removing dividing lines from your Visual Studio based Paint.NET Plugin!

 (This is written from the perspective of you already having written an effect as a vs project and you want to remove

lines from it.  CodeLab can create a Visual Studio project of a CodeLab script*, and from there you can follow this tutorial.)

 

Paint.NET v5.0 really gave us plugin authors a TON of new toys.  This version introduces a completely new type of effect pipeline, a GPU accelerated pipeline.  And, most of these new toys are restricted to this new type of effect.  However, Rick did give us 2 new features for classic effects:  1) the ability to organize our UI into sections by using tabs, and 2) the ability to clean up our UI by removing the horizontal dividers between controls--described below.

 

Starting with Paint.NET v5.0, it is possible to remove the horizontal dividing lines from IndirectUI controls.

 

Compare the Brightness / Contrast dialog boxes from Paint.NET v4.3.12 (left) and v5.0a (right):

 

        

 

This is a built-in effect dialog box, but we can use the same technique to remove the dividing lines from our own plugins.  It's easy:

 

The box on the left was built with something like this in OnCreateConfigUI():
 

configUI.SetPropertyControlValue(PropertyNames.Brightness, ControlInfoPropertyNames.DisplayName, "Brightness");
configUI.SetPropertyControlValue(PropertyNames.Contrast, ControlInfoPropertyNames.DisplayName, "Contrast");

 

and the box on the right was built like this:
 

configUI.SetPropertyControlValue(PropertyNames.Brightness, ControlInfoPropertyNames.DisplayName, "Brightness");
configUI.SetPropertyControlValue(PropertyNames.Brightness, ControlInfoPropertyNames.ShowHeaderLine, false);
configUI.SetPropertyControlValue(PropertyNames.Contrast, ControlInfoPropertyNames.DisplayName, "Contrast");
configUI.SetPropertyControlValue(PropertyNames.Contrast, ControlInfoPropertyNames.ShowHeaderLine, false);

 

 

We just need to tell IndirectUI not to show the header line for the desired controls.