在VS 2010 C＃.NET Windows窗体中重现Microsoft注册表编辑器“编辑二进制值”窗口

Question

I am trying to reproduce a window from the Microsoft built-in Registry Editor. The window is the one which is opened when you select "Modify Binary Data..." from the context-menu when a value is clicked.

The goal is to make an identical(!) window in my .NET C# application using Windows Forms.

The problem is the textBox displayed in the window which contains the binary data. I have tried using a RichTextBox, but it isn't as simple as it seems to be especially when it comes to editing data and the behaviour of this textBox.

So I have 2 questions:

1. How to achieve an identical textBox in C# using Windows Forms? Maybe you know some other ways to reproduce this textBox?
2. I also need the font name used in this textBox, I couldn't find it :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I can think of two ways you can approach this. The first is a DataGrid, painstakingly styled to have transparent grid lines and exact margins between columns, with filters to enforce hex digits only. All this, set alongside a richtextbox for the ASCII display, with your code synchronizing the selection between them.

Alternately, you can replace the DataGrid with a collection of TextBoxes, again styled for invisible borders, automatically adding new textboxes to the collection when the user adds more data.

All in all, it seems like an awful lot of work, especially in WinForms - WPF might make this a bit easier, especially the styling, but still a lot of work.

Regarding the name of that control - I tried using Spy++ to sniff it out, and it seems it's registered as a Window Class named "HEX", but I'm not sure that will really get you somewhere:

Answer 2

Here is an open source project containing a hex editor control for Winforms, looking at least very similar:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hexbox/

I guess you can modify it accordingly to your requirements. But beware, the source code for the control is ~6000 lines of code (including more than a dozen utility classes). It inherits directly from "Control" and does all the text display using GDI+ (so no modified DataGrid or RichTextBox).