How can I install the MFC Grid control control to toolbox? - visual-studio-2010

here is it. How to add this control to toolbox for using it in dialog visual editor?

That control, as posted in the article, is distributed as source code. As the article states:
To use the Grid control in your project you will need to add a number
of files to your project
If you want to include it in the toolbox, you should look to convert it into a form that the toolbox understands. Within Visual Studio, go to Tools, Choose Toolbox Items. A dialog should appear listing the types of objects you can import into the toolbox. You should be able to re-factor the source code from the article to create a custom control that can be packaged for the toolbox. Otherwise, simply choose another alternative control from what's listed in the dialog box (eg. FlexGrid).

Related

Toolbox containing no items when I'm editing a dialog

I'm maintainig an old MFC application with Visual Studio 2013. Building the application works fine, but I'm unable to use the dialog editor.
When I open a dialog from the resource view, it displays correctly, I can click on the existing items, view their properties, move them etc.
But when I open the toolbox via the View-Toolbox command (Ctrl+Alt+X), all I get is an empty toolbox as displayed below:
Right click on the toolbar and "Reset Toolbox" doesn't change anything
Right click and then "Show all" shows an impressive list of tools, among those there is the Dialog Editor, but all items are inactive as shown in the picture below:
On the other hand when I create a new MFC project from scratch, the toolbox containing the dialog items works fine.
Does anybody have an idea what could be wrong?
FYI: in the meantime I use Visual Studio 6 (yes) for editing the resources.
There are two typical work arounds to get the toolbox back in Visual Studio. One is to reset the toolbox as you've tried. The other is to delete the “.tbd” files in your corresponding C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0 folder.

How do I get access to existing icons from other components from a VS package?

I have a Visual Studio package, and I want to display the VS snippets icon - how can I get it?
I found that I needed to use IGlyphService passing in StandardGlyphGroup.GlyphCSharpExpansion and StandardGlyphItem.GlyphItemPublic. This gets me back the standard "scissors" icon for snippets.
You can get the Visual Studio icons from the Visual Studio Image Library. Simply search for snippet to find the snippet icons (sometimes it is quite hard to find a specific icon).
This icons can be freely used AFAIK. The only restriction is, that the have to be used the way they are intended to be used (don't use a delete icon for a menu item that triggers a create operation etc.)

Visual Studio Installer how to prompt for install of shortcuts

I am using the basic VS project of Other Project Types\Setup and Deployment\Visual Studio Installer\ Setup Project.
I want to give the user the option of whether or not to create a desktop shortcut to the application. I know how to create a desktop shortcut, but not to make it optional. So far I have not made any custom dialogs for the install, just using the standard interface that VS provided automatically.
Is there any way to provide the user the choice without getting into a whole bunch of customization?
Are many people using this installer? I look around, we have a 5 year old license to InstallShield, but I have also found it to be bulky and more than we need for this application.
I also looked at WiX, but I don't have the time to learn an install package right now and it looks like a fair learning curve on it.
Basically our install has .NET 4.0 requirements, installs SQL Server CE, a couple other DLL's which are just copied in and populates a structure. I am not using the registry, using the preferred resources approach for that, so it is a very straightforward install.
There several ways to do it, in general… But I don't know the particular steps for Visual Studio installer project.
Create a feature which contains the Desktop shortcut. If you have feature selection tree in your installer, present this feature as yet anther option.
With another approach, you'll have to customize one of the existing dialogs or add a new one where you can show a checkbox. The checkbox changes the value of a property which, in its turn, controls the installation of component or feature for Desktop shortcut.
Yet I guess this method is not supported by Visual Studio.
See Microsoft UX guidelines on putting shortcuts on Desktop.
In most cases, it is not necessary to put a shortcut on Desktop unless your target users start your application very often.
The general approach is this:
create a custom dialog which contains a control that can condition the shortcut, for example a checkbox
create a custom action which deletes the shortcut after install
condition it with the checkbox property
This can be done in Visual Studio:
select your setup project in Solution Explorer
click User Interface Editor button on top pane in Solution Explorer
add a Checkboxes dialog under Install -> Start
customize it to contain only a checkbox that conditions your shortcut
add your shortcut deletion custom action in Custom Actions Editor page
condition it with the checkbox property
Some commercial setup authoring tools have this feature built-in.

Register custom file type with custom UI editor in Visual Studio 2010

I found old article called LearnVSXNow and part #30 - Custom Editors in Visual Studio. There is sample project The Blog Item Editor which shows how to make custom file type assigned with custom UI editor for this file type extension (.blit)
This sample uses project VSXtra, which is written for Visual Studio 2008.
Can someone point me to some tutorial, how-to, or something how to do the same for Visual Studio 2010 ? My goal is to register custom file type extension (e.g. *.myext1) within visual studio 2010, and assign my own custom UI designer (WinForms, derived from UserControl) to handle editing content of such file visually.
I found some samples, but each of that shows only changes on code text editor (highlight some words, etc). But i want to show my own toolwindow with my usercontrol within it.
PS: Part of creating custom toolwindow with my own usercontrol within it is not problem, i use VSPackage Builder Project Template to build and register it within visx. My problem is how to register custom file type to use this custom toolwindow to edit file.
While the core text editor changed significantly (nearly a total re-write, designed around MEF) in Visual Studio 2010, the general infrastructure for registering and supplying custom editors/designers did not change.
The 'Creating Custom Text Editors and Designers' page on MSDN is a good place to start. You should also be able to go through the VSPackage wizard and choose "Custom Editor" to get a basic editor in place. It will give you a simple RTF editor.
You can also check out these samples on the MSDN Code Gallery for more ideas and inspiration:
Editor with Toolbox Support
Designer View Over XML Editor
It is usually recommended that editors reside in a document window (as opposed to a tool window). This is the paradigm that nearly all the built-in editors/designers use in Visual Studio, and it's what users expect when opening something from Solution Explorer. Editing things in a ToolWindow can feel a bit unnatural.
My understanding is that VSXtra provides some additional helper/base classes (beyond what Microsoft supports) to make various tasks (like writing a custom editor/designer) simpler. It is by no means required to create a custom editor though.

How do I install component designers in Visual Studio?

If I add [DesignerAttribute("somenamespace.mycomponentdesigner, mydesignerlibrary.dll")] to the top of a class and then install that class into the tool palette, how do I then get the mydesignerlibrary.dll installed into VS so that VS can find the designer?
This page describes the process you'd need to follow, but effectively you'd need to:
Copy the designer assembly into a folder and configure Visual Studio to search that path by creating a registry entry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework\<version>\AssemblyFoldersEx, where <version> is the lowest framework version your designer assembly is compatible with.
Note that your control projects target the earliest version of the Framework that your control will support. This is referred to as the minimum Framework version. A restart of Visual Studio is needed before the new search path can take effect.
Copy the runtime assembly into another folder; add your custom controls to Toolbox. This can be done either manually through “Choose Items…” dialog or programmatically with a Toolbox installation package.
You can do it using Toolbox in the Visual Studio.
In the toolbox window, click right button on the mouse and choose menu 'Choose Items', then you use 'Browse' button for adding your dll component, then you can see it in the toolbox window in the Advanced Section(in the bottom).

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