When an app stops in debugging mode and I make changes to the code
Is there a way to save the code with the changes, without stop the app?
Although the VB6 IDE does not provide this natively, an add-in for the IDE called MZTools has been around for ages which adds this feature.
Personally I've used MZTools 3.0 for many years, and this works really well.
This is what its help system says:
Shortcut To Save File At Debug-Time
The Shortcut To Save File At Debug-Time feature allows you to define a keyboard shortcut (Options
window, Shortcuts tab) to save the selected file at debug-time. The
Visual Basic IDE does not allow to save files at debug-time, but often
it is useful to save the modifications that you have made to the
source code at debug-time.
Remarks:
This feature is not available in the VBA version of MZ-Tools. This
feature only works at debug-time. Since Visual Basic disables buttons
or menus of add-ins at debug-time, the only way to save a file at
those times is through a keyboard shortcut. The file must be
previously saved at design-time, that is, MZ-Tools does not prompt for
a name to save the file (it shows an error message instead).
This is the options window for how I have it configured locally:
Note that originally MZTools was free in version 3 and later they switched to a paid version; if I hadn't gotten v3 originally however it would be well worth paying for, not only for this feature.
The short answer is you can't.
If you make the project before the crash, maybe this piece of code can be found in a ".tmp" file. But searching in .tmps is often a waste of time.
I particularly always force myself to stop the debug and save my progress.
And I always use this setting which forces me to remember to save:
Related
Background
I am working with VB6 legacy code and I am using an external editor because of the features that it has. Unfortunately, those changes aren't refreshed in the IDE because VB6 doesn't monitor loaded code for changes.
I have done some extensive searching on the subject including looking for alternative editors, a fairly exhaustive internet search including following all of the links on this StackExchange link and haven't found a way to refresh the code window to reflect the external file changes.
My company doesn't have access to the latest edition of Visual Studio and will not be purchasing it anytime in the near future. Until then, there is code to fix.
Question
Aside from restarting the program are there any methods that can be used to refresh the code displayed in the VB6 editing window?
Check out vbAdvance add on. It will prompt you to reload source file in case of external modification.
I think a found one possible solution.
The MZ-Tools set has an function called Reload file from Disk. It also allowed me to create a shortcut for this function through the MZ-Tools options menu, so I assigned it to the shortcut keys of my choosing.
It's a solution, but I'm still looking for anything that might be better.
How do I transfer the window layout in Visual Studio 2010 from design mode to debug mode? I have a window layout I am fairly happy with in design mode, and would prefer to not have to do all that work all over again just to change a few details in it.
I found some questions that were kinda-sorta about this, but not quite.
Any suggestions? I know about import/export settings and use it religiously (switching between single-monitor and dual-monitor window layouts) but that doesn't really help me in this particular situation, as far as I can tell.
VS shell's ViewManager serializes the window profiles in your %AppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 directory in *.winprf files (which are basically just XAML files).
There are 5 profiles: Debug, Debug-Fullscreen, Design, Design-Fullscreen and NoToolWin (when no solution is open). You can experiment with replacing your Debug*.winprf with your Design*.winprf.
Please note that any manual modification of these files is entirely unsupported, so if you break something, you're totally on your own here.
Export your settings:
Choose General Settings/Window Layouts (in VS 2013) and save the file.
Open the file in an XML editor (or whatever... it's an XML file)
Find /UserSettings/Category/Design/WindowProfile and copy the entire node.
-- This assumes your Design view is the one you want to use for both modes.
Find /UserSettings/Category/Debug/WindowProfile and replace it with the one you copied from Design.
Save and re-import.
I have one of these settings files for home, remote, and office.
Do you wish to reload the project? Where's the Reload All option.
Vote for this question and hopefully MS will implement a fix in VS2020.
With pleany of projects in a solution I for one dread doing an svn update.
This has been an issue from VS2003 but after a decade of clicking mindlessly on buttons it's getting on my wick.
Does anyone have a hack / registry entry / secret way of saying yes short of saying ignore (quick), closing and reloading the solution?
There are a couple of options you can tweak for this scenario. Both are under the Documents Options
Tools -> Options
Environment -> Documents
The first option is to just uncheck "Detect when files changed outside the environment". This will stop the reload dialog but will force you to manually reload.
The second option just below it is a bit better "Auto-load changes, if saved". This will just automatically load the changes without prompting you for every project.
Personally though I would go a slightly different route here. The problem is occuring because your managing your source code control outside of Visual Studio. If you switched to using an addin to manage within Visual Studio it would remove these problems altogether. For svn there are several free packages available including Ankhsvn which is fairly popular
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165643(VS.80).aspx
DetectFileChangesOutsideIDE
Get/Set (Boolean)
Determines whether the environment automatically reloads files opened in the IDE when the operating system notifies the IDE that the files have been modified on disk.
EDIT:
Some clarification, as that page isn't immediately obvious.
Tools Menu->Options -> Environment->Documents->Uncheck Detect when file is changed outside the Environment
I still have to use the VB6 IDE.
Unfortunately every time I start the IDE one of the buttons of the toolbar disappears. Almost always it's the Run button which goes first. Sometimes also items from the menu bar or the context menus are missing.
I have to reset the toolbars almost every time I start the IDE (Which is quite often during a typical work day). Recently I bought an IDE plugin which modifies the menu bar and requires a restart after every reset of the menu bar. (Otherwise it would crash)
I could live with just the resetting, but the restart is really annoying.
Is there something I can do?
To solve this problem:
Unload all add-ins.
Right-click on a toolbar and select the Customize... menu.
For each toolbar click the Reset... button (6 times in total).
Reload the add-ins.
For me action 3 was enough.
cf. MZTools faq (thanks to Andrea Bonafini), but these steps are originally from MSDN
It sounds like you recently bought a bad add-in. Can you get your money back? Every time I've had problems with disappearing controls in the IDE it has been due to a bad add-in. You can find out which one it is by disabling them, one by one, each time using the IDE for a while, then re-enable it and disable the next one, until the problem stops.
I still use one problematic add-in. It exhibits behavior similar to yours in that it makes the run button disappear. I avoid the problem by only loading the add-in when I need it, use it (it formats code), then I immediately unload it. If you don't use the functionality of the add-in that often, this could be an acceptable workaround.
Yea, i have this same problem with one of the add-in. But if you reset it. Shut the IDE down and open it back up again without doing anything, the IDE shouuld be able to retain the previous clean setup.
It's just guest, but:
Each graphical element on IDE (like button) is kind of resource (i.e. GDI handle).
Maybe your VB app doesn't manage these resources good enough and after sometime VB IDE cannot redraw elements like buttons (run is used often).
Also, maybe some IDE add-in is in conflict with some other add-in/application and breaks something -- I have this problem with Clip-X and MZ-Tools.
I had a similar problem when I was setting up the IDE to use for the first time, though it may not be helpful if you've been using the same IDE for a while. When I first started using the IDE, I would modify the toolbars and then close the IDE. When prompted if I wanted to save the open file I always said No, since the file was just a dummy file I was using to open the IDE with. Turns out the IDE was saving the toolbar preferences with that file, so they never got saved.
Try opening a file, customizing the UI, saving the file, then closing without modifying the code. This was the solution for me.
I've tracked down the problem and as suggested it was an add-in.
The problem went away as soon as I disabled the Visual Basic 6 Resource Editor.
How to restore your VB6 IDE without reinstalling:
Run Regedit
Find the entry for Visual Basic 6.0
Export your settings in case things
go wrong
Delete the 'UI' setting
Run VB and you will have your popup
menus back
The 'Find' button disappeared from my VB6 toolbar forcing me to select the Edit menu to use Find. I had two add-ins enabled: vbCodePrint and ResourceEditor; so I did away with both of them, turned VB6 off and back on, then put both add-ins back in and my button returned.
If you're still using the VB6 IDE, and I do amongst others, then this problem is not likely to have gone away. I use VB6 in Windows 10, and the problem is still there. But it doesn't affect me anymore.
I have had this problem a few years into using VB5 and VB6. Today, if I start VB6 directly, it may work fine the first time, but buttons will go missing the second time -- ALWAYS.
My solution, which I developed from day one:
Do whatever needs to be done to restore all your buttons. Save the Visual Basic 6.0 registry settings to a file, as suggested previously, and only keep the UI entry. Sometimes, you have to exit VB6 for it to post changes to the registry. So if this doesn't work the first time, try exiting before saving the settings.
I use my own program to launch VB6, which automatically copies my VB6 registry backup back into the registry -- by calling "RegEdit.exe /S D:\VB\IDE_Fix.reg" -- before I launch the IDE . This works every single time, and requires no action on my part.
If you read this, that means you are a programmer. You can make this work by yourself.
Mike
Reinstall,clean registry and update with SPacks etc....
If you've ever used Eclipse, you've probably noticed the great keyboard shortcuts that let you hit a shortcut key combination, then just type the first few characters of a function, class, filename, etc. It's even smart enough to put open files first in the list.
I'm looking for a similar functionality for Visual Studio 2008. I know there's a findfiles plugin on codeproject, but that one is buggy and a little weird, and doesn't give me access to functions or classes.
Vs11 (maybe 2010 had it too) has the Navigate To... functionality which (on my machine) has the Ctrl+, shortcut.
By the way it understands capitals as camelcase-shortucts (eclipse does so too). For instance type HH to get HtmlHelper.
This isn't exactly the same as Eclipse from your description, but Visual Studio has some similar features out of the box (I've never used Visual Assist X, but it does sound interesting).
The Find ComboBox in the toolbar ends up being a sort of "Visual Studio command line". You can press Ctrl+/ (by default) to set focus there, and Visual Studio will insert an ">" at the beginning of the text (indicating that you want to enter a command instead of search). It even auto-completes as you type, helping you to find commands.
Anyway, to open a file from there, type "open <filename>". It will display any matching files in the drop down as you type (it pulls the list of files from the currently open solution).
To quickly navigate to a function, in the code editor press Ctrl+I to start an incremental search. Then just start typing until you find what you are looking for. Press Escape to cancel the search, or F3 to search again using the same query. As you are typing in the search query, the status bar in the lower left corner will contain what Visual Studio is searching for. Granted, this won't search across multiple files (I've never used Eclipse much, but that sounds like what it does from your description), but hopefully it will help you at least a little bit.
If anyone stumbles upon this thread:
There's a free plugin (created by me) for Visual Studio 2008 that mimics the Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+R Open Resource dialog (note, not the Open Type dialog). It works with any language and/or project type.
You can find it at Visual Studio Gallery.
Some of the neat features are available in Visual Assist X, though not all of them. I've asked on their forums, but they haven't appeared as yet. VAX gets updated regularly on a rough 4 week period for bug fixes and a new feature every couple of months.
If you are looking for an add-in like this to quickly navigate to source files in your project:
try the Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in SonicFileFinder.
Resharper does this with the Ctrl-N keyword. Unfortunately it doesn't come for free.
Visual Studio doesn't have anything like this feature beyond Find.
Found this thread while searching for Eclipse's Ctrl+Shift+R, and after seeing the Visual Studio Gallery, found the DPack Tools (they are free, and no, I'm not endorsed in any way by them).
But it's exactly what I was searching:
- Alt+U -> File Browser (a la Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+R)
- Alt+M -> Code Browser (Method list in the actual class)
It has more features, but I'm happy with these ones.
I have been using biterScripting along with Visual Studio to do more flexible searching and manipulation.
It can search the entire workspace.
It can search within any project - EVEN IF THAT PROJECT IS NOT LOADED OR EVEN PART OF A WORKSPACE.
It can find things using regular expressions.
AND, ABOVE ALL, it can make bulk changes. For example, want to change the name of a class from CCustomer to CUser, I can do it in just a few command lines - Actually, I have written scripts for things like this I do often. I DON'T HAVE TO CLICK ON EACH INSTANCE AND MANUALLY DO THE CHANGE.
And, it is inexpensive ($0). I downloaded it from http://www.biterscripting.com .
I'm also comming from the Java Development side and was looking for the CTRL+T feature in the Visual Studio. The other answers refer to open file, but since in C# the class name and file name can be different this is not what i was looking for.
With the Class View or the Object Browser you can search for Objects and Classes
[View]->[Class View] or [View]->[Object]