What is handycontrol?

handyorg/handycontrol — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-22

★ 7,044C#Audience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((handycontrol))
    What It Does
      WPF UI components
      Polished controls
      Color picker
      Flip clock
    Tech Stack
      C#
      .NET 4.0 plus
      WPF
      NuGet
    Use Cases
      Desktop app UI
      Property editors
      Animated GIF display
      Custom layouts
    Audience
      C# developers
      Windows desktop devs
      WPF projects

mindmap root((handycontrol)) What It Does WPF UI components Polished controls Color picker Flip clock Tech Stack C# .NET 4.0 plus WPF NuGet Use Cases Desktop app UI Property editors Animated GIF display Custom layouts Audience C# developers Windows desktop devs WPF projects

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Add a color picker to a WPF desktop app without building one from scratch.

USE CASE 2

Display an animated GIF inside a Windows desktop application.

USE CASE 3

Show and edit object properties in a panel using a built-in property grid component.

USE CASE 4

Build a WPF app with more polished controls than the default Microsoft toolkit provides.

What is it built with?

C#.NETWPFNuGetVisual Studio

How does it compare?

	handyorg/handycontrol	louthy/language-ext	quartznet/quartznet
Stars	7,044	7,048	7,038
Language	C#	C#	C#
Setup difficulty	easy	easy	easy
Complexity	2/5	3/5	2/5
Audience	developer	developer	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Requires Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 4.0 or higher, primary documentation is in Chinese.

So what is it?

HandyControl is a library of ready-made interface components for building Windows desktop applications using WPF, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF is a Microsoft framework that C# developers use to create desktop programs with windows, buttons, dialogs, and other visual elements. Rather than building every interface piece from scratch, developers can pull in this library and get a collection of pre-built controls that are more polished or have features not included in the default WPF toolkit. The library includes components like a color picker (so users can visually select a color), a flip clock display, a property grid (for showing and editing object properties in a panel), animated GIF support, and layout controls like a relative panel. These are the kinds of interface elements that appear frequently in desktop software but that WPF does not provide out of the box, or provides only in a basic form. Installation is through NuGet, the standard package manager for .NET projects. The library requires .NET version 4.0 or higher and is built with the latest C# version. Development is done in Visual Studio 2022. The project has a strong Chinese-language community and the primary documentation is in Chinese, hosted at handyorg.github.io/handycontrol. An English README is available in the repository but the documentation site is in Chinese. The repository is also mirrored on Gitee, which is a Chinese code hosting platform similar to GitHub. There is a Slack group for Chinese-speaking users. The project has attracted contributions from many developers over time. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Show me how to add a HandyControl color picker to my WPF window in C# with minimal setup.

Prompt 2

How do I display an animated GIF using HandyControl in a WPF application?

Prompt 3

Give me a code example for using HandyControl's property grid to display editable object properties in a WPF panel.

Prompt 4

What HandyControl components are most useful for a settings dialog in a WPF desktop app?

Prompt 5

How do I install HandyControl via NuGet and reference it in an existing WPF project?

Frequently asked questions