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I'm writing an add-in for both VS2008 and VS2010 and I'd like to have graphical enhancements that appear on top of the code (similar to Resharper/CodeRush). Doing so in VS2010 is relatively easy using adornments, however, how do I do it in VS2008? Anyone knows a good resource/article for something in that spirit?
I know that DXCore (CodeRush) allows one to do it, however, due to license restriction (I can't bundle DXCore with my addin) I am unable to do so.
Thank you
I've ended up implementing it by myself.
The general idea is to make a transparent form (Winforms or WPF), put the adornment you want in that form, and then overlay the form at the position of the code.
Since the editor was completely rewritten between 2008 and 2010 the technique for this is going to be totally different and it seems unlikely that now, 6 months after 2010 has launched, is a good time to start writing something for 2008, especially something difficult.
That said, a great source of sample code for editor extensions is http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vsx. This is from the VSX team and has been very helpful to me while working on extensions.
I have been wondering what is the best way to do silverlight development in order to achieve the best results. So far, there are threee possibilities that come into my mind: 1 - visual studio visual editor, 2 - expression blend, 3 - coding XAML directly in visual studio.
I was especially curious about third point: are you developing silverlight by typing the XAML directly or not? I have experience with HTML authoring, and I always stayed as far as I could from visual editors (like dreamweaver) that used to output ugly HTML code...
So is it recommended to learn XAML in deep, or is it better to learn a tool and concentrate on the code?
My opinion is that it is always useful to know what the tools generate before you learn the tool itself. You mention Expression Blend, which is a wonderful tool. You should definitly look into it, but I recommend to get some basic knowledge about XAML before you let the tool do the job for you.
I do a mix. Sometimes I use Blend to build my XAML and sometimes I do it by coding the XAML directly. I find it that Blend often adds too much unnecessary code, and like to have control of what I put in, but using Blend allows you to be more efficient.
Good luck!
While you're learning how the system works, the graphical designers work ... well, they work OKAY. For production code, however, the designers open you up to all sorts of off-by-one-pixel troubles. To avoid those, write your own XAML, preferably with styles to enforce consistent spacing, margins, and the like.
My advice would be, use the designers as much as possible and if there is something you can't do with it, type the XAML.
Having a good understanding of XAML is important, but starting by using the designer will help you get used to it.
Using VS2008, I would have strongly encouraged you to use blend as the SL designer in VS was just missing. Nowadays, VS2010 has a good designer for SL but you might be interested in using blend in parallel for:
Animations
Triggers (they are part of blend's SDK, not the base SL framework)
Colors
Templates design (the create copy feature is very helpful)
Import from illustrator...
...
We are developing an ASP.NET application. We retained an outside UI design firm, and for the most part have been very pleased with their work. Their "deliverable" to us was clickable screens -- Visual Studio solutions with ASPX files, images, master pages, etc. The screens were not connected to any data source. They had dummy data so that we could see how the UI worked.
One problem we've run into is that our developers are used to using Visual Studio design mode. The pages we receive from the UI firm have problems sometimes when we pull them up into design mode. The consultant's developers coded these screens without using design mode.
We assumed they'd be using design mode, but this wasn't specified in the contract. Was this too much to assume? Is there a lot of ASP.NET development work that never goes through VS design mode?
Third party edit:
Suggestion: people responding to this question should specify which
version of Visual Studio they're
using, as Microsoft trashed the code
base that was in the VS2005 and
earlier designers, and replaced it
with the one they purchased when they
purchased the Expression products. The
two are totally unrelated, and the new
one is far better. - John
Saunders
The more and more you work with Visual Studio, the less and less you rely on Design Mode. Complicated UIs tend to make the design view look atrocious.
I (and peers) never use Design Mode, for two reasons:
I learnt in VS 2003 not to touch Design Mode because your HTML was managled by VS. (Not anymore though since 2008, but once bitten ...)
It can take ages to render.
Much quicker to drag-drop from toolbox and hand-code.
I actually find that ASP.NET developers that do use the designer to be quite rare. The Visual Studio designer is notoriously bad at generating clean markup.
I never use design mode, probably because it used to mess my markup so much. Plus I do a lot of dynamic rendering, so there is no point. And I use exclusively CSS for formatting, I don't want VS messing around.
Many never use it, because of bad past experiences. I have found little trouble with Design mode in VS2008, when using modern controls, which are up to date and have good designer support.
On the other hand, because of the earlier problems, a lot of custom server controls do not have good designer support, so are much less useful in design mode now that the earlier designer code base has been replaced with a good one.
I almost never use design mode. It typically creates ugly HTML, and call me anal, but I really like to have clean HTML. If that means hand-coding it, so be it.
I prefer doing it manually, I like to have control.
If I want to look at the result, F5.
I almost never use design mode. For me, the biggest reason is because I learned web design/development in Notepad, so I was used to (and comfortable) working with code. Design mode makes me uncomfortable because I'm never sure exactly what decisions VS will make with regard to HTML, etc. Additionally, I can't imagine that a developer would learn nearly as much about ASP.NET and VB/C# using design mode.
The only time I use design mode is to automatically configure a GridView or something like that like.
Design Mode is taking quite a beating here, but let me point out that it is great for learning about new controls. When you are new to ASP.NET, or are using a new library of controls, Design Mode is a godsend for two reasons:
You can modify properties on the Property Editor and see them reflected immediately. This is particularly true for list-container type controls, where the entire layout may depend on one property. Running your application five times to see all five layouts is very tedious.
Controls with complex behavior (and lets face it, thats why you're using a control, right?) often have a lot of configuration built into their Smart Tags. Notice the little [>] arrow in the top right of the control? Click it. It'll probably help you out big time. This is particularly true for configuring DataSources, whose syntax is very meticulous.
When I was first learning to use Telerik controls, I relied heavily on the Smart Tags they provide, which are very robust and complete. From that, you can see what kind of ASPX markup is generated and learn to work outside of Design Mode. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy, so I much prefer this approach to looking at the documentation when using something for the first time.
I'm using VS2008, and I never use the design view. I find the code view to just be easier and more responsive than the designer.
Y'know, I never even realised I use the source screens 100% of the time. I usually develop in VS2005.
Whenever I do actually open the design mode, it's by accident, and I try and hit the source view before it renders. I've never been impressed with the design mode, and find it slow as well as adding a lot of unnecessary markup. I also find that intellisense and the properties window mean that I don't need a GUI to develop.
The design mode can also be a nightmare when you're trying to add any nested items. Because we've been developing for a customer using IE6 we've been using tables for formatting so we don't need different DIV definitions. Just clicking in an empty cell can be difficult, and resizing a column can take far too long.
For things like Template Fields in grids, I don't even know how I'd go about setting this up in design view!
Having said that, design mode every time for windows apps!
Design mode is getting better and I'd say that it's likely to become more prevalent as time goes on and the design mode tools continue to improve. I design all my components for design mode, but I still do the large majority of my code by hand - it allows greater control of code layout and doesn't end up creating an auto-formatted mess that I then have to dig through to figure out what changes need making. I know that in future my components are likely going to be used by developers that do most of their design by drag/drop and it's easier to cater for that now than have to come back and do it after the event.
Granted I'm doing MVC stuff, but I never use it - I "grew up" with PHP and code editors, and it still does me just fine.
I'm using two different versions of .NET (2003 & 2005). Some of the forms that were written in 2003 can no longer be edited in 2003 and the installation requires that they be maintained in 2003, so I use KEDIT to edit those forms.
Some of the forms in one application are too big for the .NET editor and I prefer a strong editor anyway.
I have no problem working in design mode. One exception is asp:Repeaters, which are not supported, or GridViews which tend to override my manual column definitions.
The other is if VS tries to do a full project scan if I rename a control, and then fails.
We primarily use the code view. The design mode is quite buggy we've found in VS 2008. XML controls tend to barf random character sets out for some reason, and VS will generally run slow whilst trying to render everything on screen. I mainly use the code-view.
Traditionally WYSIWYG designers produced poor code and render CSS and #INCLUDEd files poorly so they were of limited use, so developers tended to code by hand. In addition, these tools allowed you to go a certain distance without real knowledge of what you were doing, which was fine for web tutorials and personal homepages, but as soon as you wanted an extra degree of control you became unstuck - when meant you had to resort to looking 'under the hood' anyway.
Although tools have improved over time, many developers are so comfortable with hand-coding that they all but forget about the Design View - I certainly can't remember last time I used it. I'm sure there are a number of situations where such tools could be genuinely useful, but we are doing fine without and don't want to be bothered with figuring when & where such features can best be used.
Our UI is complicated and it is impossible for us to use design mode with VS2005.
The only time I have touched design mode is to do a quick and dirty prototype or an internal app.
How often do I not use design mode? 99% of the time.
I'm using visual studio 2005 and have been building asp.net applications. Mostly just departmental level apps for reporting and data maintenance. They work and they look ok but they don't look great. I don't have any other tools like Dreamweaver or Expression. Can anyone name any books or resources for making better looking web pages in Visual Studio.
Thanks,
Billy
Honestly, the IDE does a fairly good job at design work. We are transitioning our designers from Dreamweaver to Visual Studio 2008, and they definitely like the tools.
Don't take this the wrong way, but some people just can't make a page look good, no matter what tool it is. I am one of those people. I can code all day long, but if I need to put a page together, it is going to look like something right of of the 90's.
I'd recommend looking for some HTML templates, and adapting them to your product. There are open source templates out there, and ones that can be bought for relatively little money.
I always try to write the code myself rather than using design tools.
There is a lot that you can to do with CSS and HTML, and it's important to understand how those pieces fit together.
If your looking for some good examples of site design, I recommend checking out http://csszengarden.com
They have a lot of different designs that are all based off the same HTML file, so it gives you some great perspective into the possibilities of CSS.
My buddy Jacob Sanford has a book out you should look at:
Professional ASP.Net Design
First thing you need to do is learn CSS. You can't expect to style anything if you don't know the technology used to do it. I would start with the HTML-Dog tutorials, and go from there. More importantly is actually having a good sense of design, and that is much, much harder.
Design skills don't have anything to do with dreamweaver. To develop a good sense of design, you need to start getting introspective about the sites you visit. Think about why things look good or bad. Paired with your CSS knowledge, when you see something that looks cool, think about how you would implement it. If you dont know, the source code is right there so take some time to figure it out.
I have been doing this for about 5 years or so now, and I still suck at coming up with new designs. (although, I am better at it then when I started.) What I do when I start a site is rip off the basic design from somewhere else, and make it my own. For asp I use devexpress controls, which have alot of great looking themes, so usually I just end up extending the look and feel of the controls to the rest of the site.
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I have experience writing console and network client/server applications in C and C++, but I know next to nothing about using the win32 visual API, MFC, Qt, wxWidgets, etc. Where is a good place to start, and what method should I specialize in, so as to be future ready and robust?
This is a rather broad question, as programming GUI applications in Windows can be done in so many ways.
There are two main parts to developing any GUI app: the language and the API/framework. Considering you're interested in learning to build Windows GUI apps, the language isn't really a point of focus for you. Hence, you should pick a language you already know and work with a framework or API that can be harnessed by your chosen language.
If you want to use C you're pretty much restricted to dealing with the Win32 API yourself, in which case reading Petzold or Richter would be great places to start. The Win32 API can be quite daunting, but it's well worth the effort to learn (imho). There are plenty of tutorials on Win32 on the web, and there's always MSDN, with a complete reference/guide to the Win32 API. Make sure you cover not just the API, but other areas such as resources/dialogs as they are building blocks for your Win32 application.
If you want to use C++ you have all of the options that you have when using C plus a few others. I'd recommend going with the Win32 API directly, and then moving on to a known framework such as MFC, Qt, wxWindows or GTK so that you can spend less time working with boilerplate code and instead focus on writing your application logic. The last 3 options I just listed have the added benefit of being cross-platform, so you don't have to worry too much about platform-specific issues. Given that you said you want to work with Windows, I'll assume you're keen to focus on that rather than cross-platform -- so go with MFC, but spend some time with the Win32 API first to get familiar with some of the concepts.
When dealing with MFC and the Win32 API, it's a good idea to try and get a solid understanding of the terminology prior to writing code. For example, you need to understand what the message pump is, and how it works. You need to know about concepts such as "owner-drawn controls", and subclassing. When you understand these things (and more), you'll find it easier to work with MFC because it uses similar terminology in its class interfaces (eg. you need to know what "translate messages" means before you can understand how and when to use PreTranslateMessage).
You could also use Managed C++ to write .NET GUI applications, but I've read in a few places that Managed C++ wasn't really intended to be used in this manner. Instead it should be used as a gateway between native/unmanaged code and managed code. If you're using .NET it's best to use a .NET language such as VB.NET or C# to build your GUIs.
So if you are going to use .NET, you currently have the choice of the WinForms library, or WPF. I personally feel that you'd be wasting time learning to build WinForms applications given that WPF is designed to replace it. Over time WPF will become more prevelant and Winforms will most likely die off. WPF has a much richer API set, and doesn't suffer from many of the limitations that Winforms does. If you do choose this route, however, you'll no doubt have to learn XAML, which is a markup language that drives WPF applications. This technology is coming of age, and there are many great places to learn about it. First, there are sites such as LearnWPF, and DrWPF which have some really great articles. Secondly, there are plenty of quality books on the topic.
So, to sum up, once you've picked your language and tech, the path is actually quite easy. Just pick up a book or two, read some blogs, get into some code samples.. and most importantly ... write code. Keep writing, keep making mistakes, and keep learning from them.
As a final note...
In other words, Silverlight. If you don't want to go the MS route you might give Adobe's Flash/Flex a look see. Both Silverlight and Flash/Flex build RIA's. Which I think is where we are headed. They days of Office like apps are numbered
I don't agree at all. Silverlight is not the same as WPF. Silverlight is web-specific, and only has a subset of WPF's features. Given that the question asks for Windows GUI apps, Flash/Flex Rich Internet Apps are not really a fitting suggestion. I also don't agree that the days of Rich Client Applications (such as office) are numbered at all.
I hope that helps. Good luck :)
I don't know if I'd call it a good place to start, but if you want to be future ready, take a look at the windows presentation foundation which is built entirely for the purpose of programming GUI's for windows
My first experience writing simple GUI applications for Windows was with C# and Visual Studio. The GUI-building interface is a simple drag and drop deal that generates skeleton methods based on potential user actions. I only did fairly basic programming with this, but I imagine it would be an excellent place to start to learn the basics and extend into the more advanced capabilities as you go.
There are plenty of online Win32 tutorials:
http://www.zeusedit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1218
There are plenty of compilers to choose from:
http://www.zeusedit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=238
I would also recommend getting the Borland Win32 SDK documentation in WinHelp file format:
http://www.zeusedit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7
It only covers the bare basics of the Win32, but when starting, this can be helpful as it is less daunting and less bloated than the MSDN.
I'd never go down the Silverlight, Flash/Flex or any similar route. It does look nice, but the main problem is that the code of the engine that runs it is completely closed-box and controlled by a single company. Take, for example 64bit versions of both of those. If some new platform emerges, you won't be able to migrate your existing code to it.
For business apps, Windows Forms is very mature. It provides a gentle path from auto-generating a lot for you into allowing fine-grained control and rolling your own. There are tons of high-quality third party controls and a large body of examples, docs, etc out there. It's hard to run into a problem that someone else hasn't solved. I highly recommend acquiring some background Win32 knowledge (e.g. Petzold) as the WinForms framework lives on top of it.
I have no WPF experience, but from the sample apps I've seen it looks like a good choice for apps whose interfaces would benefit from more graphical metaphors. So if you're doing a banking app, probably not worth the extra design overhead. But if you're doing, say, a warehouse management app it could be improved by dropping pretty boxes into pretty bins.
#StephenCox: wrong answer to the wrong question. OP is asking about desktop client apps, and moreover, WPF != Silverlight.
For a simple starting point to get your head around the "event-driven" nature basically all frameworks are created around look at FLTK.
Here are some quick starting videos Link
For professional use I'd recommend Qt, expensive but often worth it in commercial situations.
Since you are already familiar with C and C++ I would recommend learning how to write a simple Windows GUI app using Charles Petzold's book. It will give you the fundamental understanding of how Windows works. It's good to understand that most everything that you see is a window (a button is a window for example) and that these windows respond to messages. I wouldnt' spend a lot of time on this though and you don't necessarily need to do this first if you are going to chose WPF. I just think it's good to have a basic understanding of this.
There was a good podcast recently on .Net Rocks called "Kate Gregory Develops in C++ for Vista!" on there she recommends that someone starting out now should not use/learn MFC (even though it has been recently updated).
As far as getting ready for the future you need to learn WPF, but it isn't complete yet, so depending on the kinds of client side apps you want to create, you will probably need to learn WinForms. The majority of people aren't using WPF yet, so it's a good time to start learning. I think you will find it easier using C# to learn it instead of doing managed code with C++.
Get your basics right first. Best tutorial I've found is: http://winprog.org/tutorial/start.html
After that, although the homepage is hatefully distasteful, the tutorial pages are good in content and aesthetics: http://www.tenouk.com/cplusmfcdotnet.html
Then of course there's MSDN.