I've been maintaining a suite of code for my employer for several years, and a new programmer started here recently that I've been training. As described in the subject, the Run Designer feature/button (as seen in screenshot below) isn't available to him for forms that I've overridden and customized. The Grid Designer is essential for modifying the data displayed by the grid. We've spent many days trying to figure this out, so I'm posting it here in case anyone else encounters this issue.
We're using DevExpress 14.1.6 with Visual Studio 2019 [16.11.11] (this pairing isn't officially supported). Both of us are on Windows 10.
Navigate to "DevExpress 14.1\Components\Tools\Components" in your program files. Open the file DXDesignKeys.exe and check both checkboxes (Enable design-time form skinning, and Enable visual inheritance for Developer Express controls used in Visual Studio) in the user interface, then click Apply and Close.
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I have created a Windows Forms application using C# two join the functionalities of two other Windows Forms applications, in Visual Studio 2019. These two applications have references to some external dlls.
Now I have copy pasted the contents of the two old applications and added the dlls and other references, to the new application. But now, the UI controls are not being displayed during the design time. UI controls are perfectly displayed while running the application.
In Visual Studio 2012 the design file is showing an error, whose image is attached here. This application is for acquiring data from a Raman Spectrometer and do signal processing after that.
I've written a series of ActiveX controls in Delphi to be used in other development environments (like Visual Studio or dBASE for Windows, as two examples)
I used the ActiveX wizards provided as part of the RAD Studio IDE to generate the ActiveX "bindings" (for want of a better word) for my VCL-based controls, however it appears not to produce the source necessary to make them appear on IDE component pallets.
Ordinarily on those IDEs (Visual Studio and dBASE Plus), I can simply import an ActiveX control and it will show up on their toolbox (their version of a component pallet) complete with their defined icon.
Well, my own ActiveX controls produced in Delphi do not (they import just fine, but don't show up on the pallet/toolbox), and I've been scouring Google trying to find a solution for the last two weeks.
Having failed miserably, I've decided to ask here:
How do I make my ActiveX controls show up on the Toolbox in Visual Studio (and others)?
Thanks for any advice/suggestions.
EDIT: Some extra info...
I've been trying to do this with both XE2 and XE3, and it has failed every time... however, when I do the same thing (using the Wizards) with Delphi 2007, the component's icon does show up in the Pallet/Toolbox of other IDEs as desired.
This means the issue was introduced sometime after Delphi 2007, and is likely the result of some RTL/VCL modification.
My research has concluded that Unicode versions of Delphi (2009 to XE3) do not generate the correct markup for ActiveX Controls using the provided wizards.
Further-more, changes to the RTL and VCL since Delphi 2007 mean that, even if you produce the necessary source markup manually, your controls will not behave properly when embedded in non-Delphi applications (such as Visual Studio and dBASE Plus). Much of this relates to the VCL's presumption of a VCL-compliant Parent property value, where the update of properties such as ParentFont will result in an Access Violation error.
The solution in my case has been to produce the exported ActiveX Controls in Delphi 2007 (with it being the latest version to "play fair" with other ActiveX Control consumers)
Hopefully this information will save you the long and annoying fact-finding process I had to go through in order to come to this conclusion.
I'm a Silverlight newbie. Just downloaded version 3.0 after the Mix announcement. I'm running VS 2008 SP1. When I select a design element in the preview pane or in XAML, the properties window is disabled and displays
Property Editing Not Available
I can open the solution in Blend and have no problems with it's property editor. So within Visual Studio, I'm forced to enter everything in the XAML pane and rely on Intellisense.
Is something wrong with my installation or environment? Or am I supposed to switch back and forth between Expression Blend and Visual Studio (I can't believe that should be the case).
There is nothing wrong with your installation or environment. The XAML designer/editor in VS2008 is very limited in what it offers for XAML editing whatever the version of Silverlight, being really just a rendering engine at the moment.
Expression Blend is the visual editor of choice for now - there are 3rd party editors available (such as XAMLCruncher and Kaxaml) but they don't really support XAML with code-behind classes.
Additionally the Blend 3 preview that was released to support SL3 seems to have a few improvements which address previously inferior experience of directly editing XAML in Blend (notably IntelliSense).
I had the same problem with Visual studio 2010 and Silverlight 5.0. It was intermittent.
One thing I found to help is to switch the XAML page to show Design view and then switch back to Code view or vice versa. If you have hybrid view, just temporarily switch.
I did that and it just worked fine. I do n't know the reason it worked but it did.
Is something wrong with my installation or environment? Or am I supposed to switch back and forth between Expression Blend and Visual Studio (I can't believe that should be the case).
You'll find you need to do that a lot for both Silverlight and WPF if you want to make full use of the UI controls.
I find VS incredibly slow and clunky for designing and rendering XAML and much prefer Expression. Switching between the two is no big deal as really one's for code and ones for design.
I haven't download the Silverlight 3 Beta yet, but the Silverlight 2 designer intergration in visual studio is very poor.
VS 2010 is suppose to have better support for XAML Editing in WPF and Silverlight. So for now, you'll have to find the right balance between Blend and VS.
SilverLight 3.0 beta just shipped. VS2008 SP1 shipped last year. It would be surprising if it supported SilverLight 3.0 out of the box, and more suprising if the VS support that ships with SilverLight 3.0 beta were not "beta" quality.
If you find problems, then be certain to report them to Microsoft.
I am trying to move a C# Compact Framework 1 application from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 (no comments please on how outdated all this is :-)). I am now able to compile and run the app in VS 2005 just fine, however when I open one of the forms, the form designer does not show the actual form layout but just some rows of icons, one for each control on the form. I have no idea why, or how to get back the standard form designer view. Does anybody have any experience with that and any hints or tips?
Well some things changed while going from VS2003 to VS2005 one of those things is the way the form designer adds code to your Form class. It creates a separate .designer.cs class and creates a partial class with the same name as you main form class. All the designer generated code now goes in this background class. This is done so that the form designer generated code stays out of your hair.
Now its plausible that the VS2005 designer no longer recognizes the in-file designer code generated by the previous version. You can try to create a new WinForms project and see how it differs from your current project then make appropriate amends to your current project.
A question to those of you who already looked at VS2010. How big are the changes that add-in developers will have to make in order to get their add-ins working under VS2010?
As luck would have it I've just written about this exact subject and shown what it took to upgrade my add-in. (links below)
Basically your answer is that there is a low-impact migration, because a back-wards compatible "shim" is in place for most functionality. Understandably though, to get the new stuff in 2010 like MAF, MEF, and WPF there will be some work on the developers part.
http://jb-brown.blogspot.com/2008/11/migrating-visual-studio-add-in-to-2010.html
http://jb-brown.blogspot.com/2008/11/migrating-visual-studio-add-in-to-2010_29.html
(more to come)
Lastly - Be sure to read this outstanding post from Carlos Quintero, MVP about Add-Ins, Frameworks and CLR compatibility. Carlos's blog is the best I've found for add-in stuff.
We've already migrated a development version of our Visual Lint product to VS2010, and for the most part the migration was straightforward - or would have been if there weren't so many bugs in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 automation model. The experience has been akin to the work we had to do to support VS2005 (by contrast VS2008 was a breeze), so it's obvious that VS2010 represents a major change in the evolution of Visual Studio.
As we're using the same binary for all versions of Visual Studio we support (which means the code is contstained to be native C++ throughout), breaking changes in the interfaces tend to be quite visible to us. This time, the areas which have caused us issues are:
The new .vcxproj project file format (we parse project files to read project properties as that's more reliable across multiple Visual Studio versions than using VCProjectEngine - the Visual C++ automation model). Hence we had to write a new parser for .vcxproj files, and as they are potentially very complex that was a major task in itself.
Various bugs in the command bar/command interfaces (presumably related to the new WPF editor/command bar integration). Carlos Quintero has blogged extensively about this subject, so if you have concerns in this area you would be well advised to read his blog.
An undocumented change to the add-in startup sequence in Beta 1 which meant that the DTE Window interfaces were not functional until the OnStartupComplete event had occured. MS have informed us that they are reversing this particular change in Beta 2 due to potential compatibility issues, but we've desensitised our code to this one now, anyway.
Toolwindows in Beta 1 can't be created by internal CLSID (though ProgID works OK). This is the last one we're waiting on before we can wrap up the last major bit of the port.
I suspect that our experience will be pretty representative for most add-ins - it is only if you are using the areas affected directly by major changes in Visual Studio itself (e.g. editor or intellisense integration) that the effects are likely to be particularly severe.
Finally, we're not planning to migrate the build itself to VS2010; it is currently built in VS2008, and we quite simply can't see any reason to migrate to an IDE which is showing every sign of still being a "work in progress" even when it RTMs later this year (that's just my personal opinion though - YMMV).