I need to know how to open the form of a program I am debugging.
I loaded an existing solution into VS2010, I can see the code, but I want to see the GUI part of the project, click on buttons and see what part of the code they take me to, set breakpoints where I feel like.
I don't know how to see the GUI in VS2010, where can I do that?
Also, where would be a good resource to learn the ins and outs of VS2010?
Depending on how the UI was created, there may or may not be a way to see the UI at design time. Particularly if this is an older Windows UI application, it's likely that the windows are created entirely in code, and there is no design-time UI for you to see.
There is a dialog editor, for dialog windows that are defined in resource (*.rc) files. CTRL-SHIFT-E brings up the Resource Viewer and you can look for things under the Dialog node. It is possible that your main window is a dialog-style window, as that's one of the options you get when you create a new MFC-based application.
Otherwise, your only option to see what your UI looks like is to run the program and see. Tracking down which UI elements do which actions in your program will require finding the appropriate event handlers or message handler methods (again, depending on what UI framework, if any, is in use) and setting breakpoints.
The generic answer is:
Hit F5 to starting Debugging mode. (Or under the Debug menu choose Start Debugging)
But it depends on how your project is setup and what type of project it is if F5 will work that easily for you.
What kind of program/language are you using?
With a form, I believe you have to File-->Open-->Project/Solution
Now if its a website, you would open Website. If you tried to open a windows form under a website then you wont see the design.
Typically you would just double click your form name (form1.cs) because then your design view will pop up or hit Shift+F7 or rightclick --> view designer. Then just double click whatever tools you have on your form (like a button) and it will automatically go to the button code.
If its a website, then it would be under website1.aspx while the code sits in website1.aspx.cs
But if none of that helps, here is a good place to learn this stuff
VisualStudioWalkthroughs
Related
I have a dialog type application that includes a MFC EditBrowse Control. This control includes a folder/magnifier icon on the right side where the user is supposed to click to bring up a folder browser pop-up.
That folder/magnifier icon displays properly in the dialog editor within Visual Studio, but at runtime it displays as a plain flat button. It behaves properly otherwise - that is, the browser pop-up pops up and the selected folder is displayed when the user clicks OK.
When run with the debugger a message is displayed in the VS Output Window saying "Can't load bitmap: 4299". That message is displayed after the CDialogEx::OnInitDialog() line within my OnInitDialog().
I've written test programs and they display the icon properly. I've also added additional EditBrowse controls in my original program, but they experience the same problem and just add another line of "can't load bitmap". I've also added other MFC controls and some of them also do not display their icons (or other stuff).
I've managed to affect the problem slightly by making calls to EnableBrowseButton() and EnableFolderBrowswButton() from my OnInitDialog. If I do that, I get an icon that looks like 3 horizontal dots:
which is better, but I'd prefer the folder/magnifier icon.
It's a complicated enough application I'd rather not re-write it from the beginning and furthermore I'd like to understand what is going on. I'm fairly certain this is a result of adding/deleting controls as the app was developed, but don't have a good idea on where to begin tracking down where things went awry.
Thoughts on how to debug this? BTW, this is VS 2010.
CMFCEditBrowseCtrl uses the Visual Manager to load the bitmap from MFC resources.
This resource is loaded in "afxribbon.rc"
Make sure the following these lines are included in the main *.rc file (this is how VS Wizard creates the *.rc file)
#if !defined(_AFXDLL)
#include "afxribbon.rc" // MFC ribbon and control bar resources
#endif
(I guess you can omit the #if/end statement, but it's probably there for a reason)
Alternatively, CMFCEditBrowseCtrl::SetBrowseButtonImage can be used to assign user icon.
I am creating a windows using win32:
HWND mainWnd = CreateWindow(...);
Now I can add gui elements as children of mainWnd. However this soon becomes a bit tedious and I want to use the designer built into Visual Studio to help me.
I noticed that under Add Resource there is a Dialog entry. Among the dialogs IDD_FORMVIEW seems the most general so I added one of these. Next I added gui elements to it using the designer.
Now I want to use this as a child of my mainWnd. How do I do this?
I found some examples using DialogBox, but I do not want a separate dialog, I want this window as a child of my mainWnd.
The designer in Visual Studio is appropriate for creating dialog boxes, not arbitrary windows.
That being said, there are a couple of approaches (in increasing order of difficulty):
Make your main window a dialog. Petzold's book has an example of using a dialog as the main window of the program. (If I recall correctly, it's the calculator example.)
Create the dialog and, before you show it, change its style to WS_CHILD, change its extended style to WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT, and parent it to your main window. For all the navigation stuff to work, you'll have to add IsDialogMessage calls in your message pump. This is do-able, but it's likely hard to get everything working well.
A mixture of 1 and 2 where you create one dialog for your main window, then create a second dialog for the content (with DS_CONTROL), and put the second dialog in the first. I've never tried this approach myself, but it seems like it should work.
Write your own code to parse the dialog resource and create the child windows, which is basically re-doing a lot of the work that CreateDialog does for you.
Given your desire to use the GUI to design the UI, I suspect only the first solution is simple enough that you would be interested.
Use the CreateDialog API to create the window from the resource. If you do not want it to look like a dialog then remove the titlebar style from the resource properties.
To use a dialog created from a dialog resource template you have to specify the DS_CONTROL window style in the template.
Read more about dialog boxes here.
Dialog resources are explained here
My BizTalk (2006) orchestrations open by default in design view. I need to see the file behind (which appears like XML). I don't know how to switch.
With winforms and the like, F7 is the 'go to code' shortcut but I can't find any equivalent for this.
The only thing which sometimes work is to search for a string which appears in the orchestration and within the code of BizTalk. I have done a search for my string within Search Files (under find) and the Find Results box shows me the string lives in MyFile.odx (and it displays the ). However, I can't get the actual code on screen as it only shows the design view.
So, just to make sure this is really clear, I want to switch between the 2 screen shots:
From the Design View:
to the 'code behind' view:
Right click -> Open with.. -> XML Editor
As a work around, I can open it from Windows Explorer in notepad. Not ideal, but at least I'm not stuck any more.
I want to achieve that when the user installs the WP7 control library he will find it in the Visual Studio toolbox automatically without manually adding it. In addition I would like to organize toolbox tabs in a logical manner.
I know it can be done for other platforms. For example I tried writing *.design.dll as described here - it does not work for WP7.
Any pointers how to work with toolbox for VS 2010 / WP7?
Nobody answered, so here is my brief summary:
The control library cannot be added to the Toolbox automatically unless you program VS plugin (package). Too much work for me...
*.design.dll (see the link above) basically works.
2a) You can hide controls from the Toolbox (BrowsableAttribute) and you can define control icons. That's probably everything you can do for Toolbox. The user has to add Toolbox tabs and "choose items" manually.
Well, I am not quite sure here, because when you drop the control dll file onto the Toolbox, then at least ToolboxTabNameAttribute works, i.e. corresponding Toolbox tabs are created automatically. Unfortunately, the tab is empty.
Also, when the control library is properly installed, then some of the controls are added to Choose items Toolbox dialog. Unfortunately, in my case most of the controls are missing and have to be added by manual browsing.
2b) Designer support (Properties window for the control) is better. You can hide properties (BrowsableAttribute), define categories (CategoryAttribute) and define descriptions (DescriptionAttribute).
Descriptions can be extracted from you documentation xml file, so that you don't need to write them again. To get the code google for MetadataBase.cs. Just be carefull, the files you'll find contain fatal bugs (ParseDescription method) and ignore some properties (getters that return a collection).
After all, the result is not that bad.
This is how I expected the toolbox to work:
Let's say I add a custom Tab to the Toolbox called "Ajaxtoolkit." To add controls to the new tab, I right mouse click and select "Choose Items" and browse to a file, Ajaxtoolkit.dll, that is of a particular version number.
I would expect that when I save and reopen the solution, that the Ajax Toolkit custom tab would still be in my Toolbox and that it would contain the same controls that were there last time, the controls that were in the dll that I referenced when the controls were added.
If I created a brand new web app, I (possibly) wouldn't expect to see the same Ajax Toolkit custom tab. However, I could perform the same steps as above and add a "Ajax Toolkit" tab and perhaps, this time, select a DIFFERENT VERSION of the tookit, and the state of the toolkit would be retained with each solution file.
Another possibility would be for the original Ajaxtoolkit to be retained when the 2nd web solution is created, and perhaps, if I wanted to mix versions of the toolkit across diffreent web sites in my solution, I should start naming my custom toolkit tabs with version specific names like "Ajaxtoolkit 4.0," etc.
...But instead, the Ajaxtoolkit tab disappears when I close VS2010 and reopen it.
Why? Is this desirable behavior or a bug?
You know VS2010 is a fully customizable IDE, may be these features conflicts your toolbox customization.