Introduction
3D Control Magic (Ctl3dMagic.dll) is a set of 9 .NET controls that will give you the possibility to use new "look & feel" controls inside your applications; creating skinned applications using these controls is really easy: each of the contained controls can use a variety of shapes, surfaces, special effects, textures, bitmaps, animations, sounds, colors and fonts.
The strength of this product is the fact that it doesn't make use of predefined bitmaps, created with expensive graphical applications, in order to render the controls surface: it calculates the surfaces 3D rendering using a proprietary algorithm whose quality cannot be found in any of the few competitors on the market: this will allow to save time and money each time you will have to make a customization of your applications; furthermore, thanks to the use of predefined "templates", you can change all the settings of a button with a single line of code during the application execution.
3D Control Magic can be used as an alternative to some standard Windows controls of common use: inside the
Tutorials section of this help file you will find a lot of tutorials that will help you getting the best from this product.
3D Control Magic is fully UNICODE compliant, so you will have the possibility to use it with the various languages (such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) that make use of double-byte characters.
3D Control Magic comes with 4 different editions, each tailored to the differing needs and budgets of software developers:
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Deluxe edition
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Contains the Professional edition of the control and the full version of our our 3D Button Visual Editor application.
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Professional edition
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The full featured set of controls.
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Standard edition
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A subset of the features available inside the Professional edition.
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Light edition
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A subset of the features available inside the Standard edition.
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The following chart provides a quick comparison overview of the features available inside the 4 different editions:
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Light
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Standard
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Professional
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Deluxe
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Buttons caching system
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Custom shaped buttons
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Pictures, textures and sounds support
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Surface coloring in different button states
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Multiple texts support (up to 9 at the same time)
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Cells support
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Support for Radio buttons and Checkboxes
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Anti-aliasing for button surface borders and texts
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New button surfaces (Aqua, Plastic, Gel, Neon, etc.)
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3D linear gradients
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Text effects: halo, transparency, double width, solid background, rotation angle
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Support for Labels, GroupBoxes, PictureBoxes, Enhanced Standard Radio buttons and Enhanced Standard Checkboxes
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Form Shaper control
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Better animations management
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Transparency support for button's surface, cells and pictures
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Full version of 3D Button Visual Editor
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Inside the documentation you will find the following sentences to understand if a feature is available or not in a certain edition:
(Available only with Professional edition): in this case the feature is available only in Professional and Deluxe editions.
(Not available with Light edition): in this case the feature is available only in Standard, Professional and Deluxe editions and not in Light edition.
If none of the previous sentences is specified, the feature is available inside all of the editions.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
For a best visualization of the control it is recommended the use of High Color or True Color monitor settings, i.e. at least 65536 colors.
