Home/ Questions/Q 8870217
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-14T17:40:07+00:00

I’ve taken up the task of doing something a bit harder than I initially

  • 0

I’ve taken up the task of doing something a bit harder than I initially thought it would be – considering my lack of skill in this area – but I’m still determined to get it done.

I am trying to design a simple custom windows forms control that shows a small weekly calendar. The idea is that I want it to fill up with colored blocks indicating time used time slots in increments of 15 minutes. The time range for any given day is 8am until 10pm, so that’s 14 hours with 4 blocks per hour for a total of 56 blocks in any given day. The smallest time interval to actually be used is 1 hour, next being 1 hour and 15 minutes, then 2.5 hours. I’d like to be able to pass into this control an object representing a class schedule for a given class in university, which normally takes place for 3 hours a week, one hour a day for 3 days. I want the control to look at the data of the object to determine what times it needs to black out on the calendar.

Now here’s my question. What kind of control do you think might be best to accomplish this? My first thought was to use some kind of datagridview as the basis of my custom control with 56 rows and 7 columns. I’m sure this is not the optimal way to do it (nor even a very good one – but it’s all I can think of) since I can’t think of a way for the control to be able to color either 4, 5 or 10 consecutive blocks.

Does anybody have a suggestion on how I can approach this? Thanks.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Trying to shoehorn that functionality into an existing control will get complicated fairly fast. To use a grid you would programmatically have to change the background color of each cell every time you loaded in a new data object.

    As an alternative, what you can do is have a User Control that just draws everything via GDI+ (System.Drawing). Have the background of the control just be the grid lines, and manually draw the rectangles on top of that grid

    There’s also a few third party controls out there that I think will give you what you are looking for if you are open to that, they are usually found googling for “outlook scheduler controls”

    • 0