Does anyonw know how to extend, i.e., add funcionalities to the Entity Designer in Visual Studio?
For instance, I want to right click a property of an entity on the designer and have a new option on the context-menu that allows me to do any stuff I want.
The Entity Designer in VS 2008 SP1 doesn't have many extensibility hooks. What you could do is leverage the Visual Studio extensibility (VSIP, now known as VSX):
Add in your own context menu
Use IVsMonitorSelection to get the current selection, from which you can get ISelectionContainer.
If the user has selected the diagram surface, you can then cast ISelectionContainer as DiagramDocView. This is part of 'DSL', which is the framework that the Entity Designer uses for its designer surface.
From here you can do lots of things within the DiagramDocView. DiagramDocView.CurrentDiagram will give you the Diagram object. You can call Diagram.NestedChildShapes to get all shapes in the diagram. To make changes to the diagram, you will have to create a DSL transaction and perform your edits to the shapes in the transaction. This is simply another level above the Entity Designer and everything will be handled correctly:
using (Transaction tx = store.TransactionManager.BeginTransaction(txText))
{
// do something, such as creating an EntityTypeShape;
tx.Commit();
}
The Entity Designer in VS 2010 will have a lot more extensibility hooks to allow you to influence the model through the property window or through the wizard. New extensibility work in the new 'Model First' feature will basically allow you to generate anything from a model within Visual Studio in a composable way.
Related
I have the hardest time creating an WebForms RDLC report with my business objects, in Visual Studio 2010. I am using the designer to build my report.
In the Report Data View of VS2010 I select New/Dataset... Strange enough, the Data Source Configuration Wizard immediately pops up, covering the Dataset Properties dialog.
When I cancel the Wizard, I am able to manipulate the Dataset Properties dialog somewhat, but none of my business objects does show up. Actually, nothing selectable shows up at all.
What do I need to have my business object selectable?
Note: Earlier in the project, this once worked. I must have changed something, but what?
I have read this question, but my Dataset is in the same project, on the ASPX-Page's code behind file. I have set it up like so:
public IEnumerable<MyDto> Getxy() {
return new List<MyDto>(); //TODO later use real data.
}
I have also read this one but my object already matches what's suggested there. It is a really simple POCO DTO's with no constructor (which makes it automatically have a public parameterless constructor)
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.
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.
Can anyone suggest the best place to add solution or project events, such as ProjectAdded, to a Visual Studio add-in?
If I do this when the add-in connects then there's no solution loaded, so how can I tell when a solution has been loaded?
For example, if I write an event to handle project items being added, where should I attach this? The event would be fired by the project, and that in turn by the solution, so I can't attach the events when the add-in connects because there is no solution when the add-in connects.
On the other hand, if I add them in the Exec() event then I need to do checks such as whether the event has been attached already, and I'm sure there must be a neater way sometime between the connection events and the Exec() event.
You probably figured this out long ago, but anyway: You can setup your events from within OnConnection like shown below, this is a snippet of an Addin's Connect class (assuming you're using c#):
using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Resources;
using EnvDTE;
using EnvDTE80;
using Extensibility;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.CommandBars;
namespace MyAddin1
{
/// <summary>The object for implementing an Add-in.</summary>
/// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />
public class Connect : IDTExtensibility2, IDTCommandTarget
{
private DTE2 _applicationObject;
private AddIn _addInInstance;
private SolutionEvents _solutionEvents;
public void OnConnection(object application, ext_ConnectMode connectMode,
object addInInst, ref Array custom)
{
_applicationObject = (DTE2)application;
_addInInstance = (AddIn)addInInst;
// check the value of connectMode here, depending on your scenario
if(connectMode == ...)
SetupEvents();
}
private void SetupEvents()
{
// this is important ...
_solutionEvents = _applicationObject.Events.SolutionEvents;
// wire up the events you need
_solutionEvents.Opened += new _dispSolutionEvents_OpenedEventHandler(_solutionEvents_Opened);
_solutionEvents.AfterClosing += new _dispSolutionEvents_AfterClosingEventHandler(_solutionEvents_AfterClosing);
_solutionEvents.ProjectAdded += new _dispSolutionEvents_ProjectAddedEventHandler(_solutionEvents_ProjectAdded);
}
// add procedures to handle the events here, plus any other
// handling you need, ie. OnDisconnection and friends
}
The main point is, to wire up the solution and project events you need, it's not important if a solution or project is already loaded. They're not attached to any particular solution or project, they're provided by the Visual Studio object model and are embedded within the EnvDTE namespace.
It wouldn't make much sense to do anything else anyway, since you can configure an addin to load when VS starts, and in this case there will never ever be any solutions/projects loaded.
There's a few catches though:
It's important that you keep a reference to the SolutionEvents class as a member variable within your connect class, otherwise the events will never fire, (see also here).
You need to make sure you check the connectMode parameter passed into OnConnection. This gets called multiple times with different parameters, and if you do it the wrong way you may get the event wired up multiple times, which definetly will be a problem. Also, usually any Addin IDE, like Menus and stuff, is set up from within OnConnection, so you may end up with duplicate menu items if you don't do it right.
Here's a few pointers, some of the code provided is VB code, in case you're looking for that:
HOWTO: Adding buttons, commandbars and toolbars to Visual Studio .NET from an add-in
HOWTO: Getting Project and ProjectItem events from a Visual Studio .NET add-in.
HOWTO: Add an event handler from a Visual Studio add-in
Finally, here's a list of articles, about 70% of them cover basic and advanced topics regarding addins:
Resources about Visual Studio .NET extensibility
Find the section entitled MZ-Tools Articles Series (about add-ins) and have a look at what's covered there.
In my current job we are not allowed to use databinding. I’m currently using a code generator (ORM) to generate the data layer objects. In the past I usually generated a data source (from the object) and do a drag and drop to automatically add the controls (with the correct databinding to the WinForm).
Is there is a way to do something similar (programmatically) using Visual Studio?
I tried to use the a copy and paste approach (by analyzing the data of the control, in the clipboard, generated by VS), but unfortunately the format used by VS to serialize the control to the clipboard is binary (I was hoping that the format was XML because I can easy modify that). Other approaches I tried was generating the designer code using a code generator. Unfortunately this only works if I want to create a new form but it is, from a practical point, unworkable if you want to add new controls to an existing form.
Controls are just objects. Any properties you can set in the designer can be set in code as well. And event handlers are just delegates. You can build the entire GUI without using the designer at all -- just write the code. I've done this several times with dynamically-generated GUI elements.
Spend some time reading through the code that the Visual Studio designer generates, and you'll quickly see how to do the same things by hand.