Visual Studio allows you to design components visually. For example, you are designing a Windows form. You change its property in the properties editor. The IDE will generate the code in a partial class in xx.designer.cs file. We can customize this behavior by changing the UITypeEditor for the properties.
The question now is: Can we extend this code generation behavior? For example, we change a setting in the property window, and then the IDE will add a .NET attribute to the class?
To my knowledge, that is not possible. Sorry. Such a thing IS possible with Eclipse, however, because it's open source.
Related
Often, when I'm looking for information of how to set certain properties of controls (I'm using Visual Studio primarily, but this question does apply to any IDE), the examples I find normally involve programatically setting said properties.
Here's an example, using the DataGridView.DefaultCellStyle property on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.datagridview.defaultcellstyle(v=vs.110).aspx
So my question is: is it better for a programmer to modify these properties by code, or is it better to use the IDE itself to change them via the properties pane? I realize that doing it the latter way will result in auto-generated code anyway, but it will be "somewhere else" in relation to the main bulk of user-generated code.
It depends on your requirements. If the app you are developing is planned to be dynamic, then it is a good idea to do it the way it is described in the reference you provided. For example, you may create a class containing the method which will set the basic settings of the gridview, so on every page you may just call this method and pass to it the gridview as a parameter instead of repeating setting the grid properties on every page.
I have to modify an old VB6 program that uses ActiveReports 2.0 at work and I am having some problems (BTW I have never used this program before and only have a basic knowledge of VB6)...
I have to make some text boxes biggers which is pretty easy to do but as soon as I move them a whole section of text (and not simply the content of that text box) disappear.
I have noticed that it was in some sort of section (sorry, I don't know how they call that) which englobed those text boxes so I made it bigger and that made no difference.
What could be causing this?
Thank you!
Nick
It sounds like the TextBox is inside a UserControl. A UserControl is created by a developer, and is basically one control with any number of other controls in it. You can check to see if there are any User Controls in your project in the Project Explorer (Ctrl+R).
One way to know exactly what class the control belongs to is to open your form in design mode (Shift+F7), click on the control, and look at the Properties window (F4). The drop-down list should show the currently selected control's class name in bold, then the name of the object.
What is the control's class? If it is anything other than TextBox, then this would explain the unexpected behavior you experienced.
I'm using the Visual Studio 2010 Class Diagram designer and it does a nice job of showing relationships between a parent class and the classes that make up the properties of the parent. In the below sample, we can see that the IFoo interface has a property named Bar which is of type IBar.
However, if I add existing classes, interfaces, etc... that were created outside the designer it does not show the relationships. See sample below...
The code is all the same; and correct; but the representation on the design surface is different. For existing classes, is there a way to instruct the designer to make the correct links without having to manually recreate the items using the designer?
I wasn't able to find a way to do it for the whole diagram, but I did find a Property level context-menu item (e.g. Show as Association) which fixes it one Property at a time.
Just a quick question: When talking in terms of an IDE, what is a property editor?
You're probably hearing about the Properties Window in Visual Studio that allows you to change the properties exposed by a control at Design Time.
It looks something like this (at least, if you're kickin it old school), but generally you'll find it implemented as a grid-based window in all IDEs:
Otherwise, you're probably talking about a custom class that inherits from UITypeEditor and allows you to add design-time support to a custom control that you've created. It works in conjunction with the Properties Window shown above to add additional functionality that is relevant to the specific needs of your custom control. This is discussed in detail in this CodeProject article.
I need to create a from which uses the same ListBox as the one from Collection Editor of Visual Studio (The ListBox under the Members label). Please, explain exactly which WinForms control is this and which of its properties are set?
You can see the control I am asking about under the Members: label of every collection editor form in design time of Visual Studio.
Thank you.
Hopefully this can get you started. There's other (probably better...) samples out there, but this is a basic starter which can help you get the concept:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9zky1t4k%28VS.90%29.aspx
Quote:
This example shows how to create a
control named ContactCollectionEditor
that implements a custom collection
editor. The example shows how to
specify the exact type of the object
that a page developer can add to the
control's collection property when
using a custom collection editor. You
associate a collection editor with a
collection property (or the type of
the property) by applying the
EditorAttribute to the collection
property of the control.