Style for VS Solution Explorer TreeView - wpf

I would like to implement a treeview control in a WPF app that has similar look and feel as the TreeView in Visual Studio's Solution Explorer.
I've heard Visual Studio was developed with WPF.
I'm assuming Microsoft used System.Windows.Controls.TreeView for Solution Explorer.
How can I style my TreeView so that it looks and behaves like the one in Visual Studio's Solution Explorer?
Update
As Ed suggested, I used Snoop to determine that VS uses the SolutionPivotTreeView. I guess it's not opensource. I wish I could find something more actively maintained than TreeViewEx.

Related

When to use Blend for a WPF developer?

I'm a WPF developer and use VS Pro 2012 everyday for UI adjusting and coding. I installed Blend for Visual Studio but I never used it (just launched it by accident several times).
I'm afraid that I missed something by not using Blend. If I did miss something, what is it then?
Blend lets you design WPF UI, create controls and determine their behaviors visually (by UI), and Visual studio lets you do that programatically.
There is nothing you can do in blend, that you can't do in visual studio.
It is a tool for people who are less comfortable using code, and more comfortable using a cool UI to create custom controls and behaviors and design thier UI
In Visual Studio 2012 and later, the WPF UI designer is Blend; it's actually loaded in the background and accessed through out-of-process COM interfaces. This is part of the reason its behavior can be a bit bizarre at times, why you get messages about being able to edit the XAML while the design surface is loading.
If you're used to VS form builders you're going to be fine with Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2012 Style Window

I'm interested in creating a window in WPF that has a style similar to the way Visual Studio 2012 looks (the seamless window with color around edges, color is not necessary). This might not be a very programming - oriented question, but does anyone know of a library like the Fluent Ribbon library that can create this style?
Thanks!
I think if you look for the term "Custom Window Chrome" you'll get answers about what you're looking for. I wrote a library a while back that did a lot of the work for this:
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/WPFShell
There's also a blog post linked there that explains how it's implemented:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wpfsdk/custom-window-chrome-in-wpf

Issues with WPF controls and Visual Studio Toolbox

Installing WPF Controls onto a machine is a messy task.
I tested installation in various systems including VMs. Following are the issues I have seen.
Controls not installed in the VS Toolbox.
Controls are isntalled but, cannot be dragged-n-dropped onto the WPF Window
Duplicate entries in the Toolbox sometimes!
I do not know what is wrong with the ToolboxControlsInstaller package. It messes up the Toolbox all the time, well most of the times.
Any guidelines what is the best practices to install WPF controls?
Our customers are very annoyed with these Toolbox behaviors.
Any help is welcome!
Regars,
-Datte
Our customers were annoyed too.
So I wrote this tutorial article covering toolbox installation once and for all:
Visual Studio Toolbox Control Integration
The most convenient approach seems to be using the Toolbox Controls Installer (TCI) package already pre-installed in VS2010 and newer. This includes just adding a key in registry, i.e.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ToolboxControlsInstaller\SampleControl, Version=3.7.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3cc4c7b61201d46c
You can also specify a custom tab name.
If you don't have a custom installer for your components, wrapping the DLLs in a VSI or VSIX package may be convenient. The VSIX is more powerful, support quiet install, custom tab name and uninstallation, but only VS2010 or newer.
Be careful with registry + VS2012. I discussed how the registry should be updated for VS2012, or simply call:
devenv.exe /ResetSkipPkgs
and then
devenv.exe /Setup
To clear things up.
Sometimes one also have to clear the Toolbox cache (TBD files), which seems to be a quite evil thing!
How do you install WPF controls into toolbox? However, these are all common issues with Visual Studio toolbox if you(or someone while installing other components) have done some mistakes in configuring. Refer the below links which has suggestions to avoid these issues.
Installing controls to VS 2010 procedure : How to add my custom WPF control to the ToolBox by using the WPF ToolBox Control template
Icons messed up issue : Visual studio 2005 toolbox icons messed up (though this is not reported with VS 2010, this solution would work for VS 2010 also).

Expression Blend and Scatterview

I would like to animate a ScatterView Control using Expression Blend
However, it seems that Blend doesn't recognise this control and nothing is visible on the design surface despite it being in the xaml
Is there an addon or something that you need to get Blend to recognise controls that are specific to MS Surface?
Have been googling this for ages but can't find any info on this
Any ideas?
I created a Blend WPF project in Visual Studio (I always start that way) and opened it in vanilla Blend. Everything fine here, ScatterViewItem is being rendered and I could manipulate it. You should start from the project templates Microsoft ships for Visual Studio to have the required references being set. Have you done this that way?

How to create a control like Solution Explorer in Visual Studio?

I want to create control that seems and works like the Solution Explorer of Visual Studio.
I mean not the functionality of solution explorer, the control should be seems like that control. That means, server explorer, toolbox, error List,... All these controls will pop-out when we put mouse and pop-in when we leave. We can lock and unlock those controls also.
So can anyone help me, to get the solution for this problem.
Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!
I am assuming you are using C#/VB.NET for development. The dockpanel suite will provide a docking framework for an application. Basically in terms of dockpanel, it is the forms which can be docked on the application using drag and drop like visual studio.
So create a treeview control in the form and dock it to the parent. You can populate the treeview control based on file directories or any specific needs of your project. Please note in dockpanel you create a form by not inheriting from Form class but from DockContent class. Documentation will give you more insight of how to create applications. It has a good example along with the source code in which it simulates the all the visual studio panes. It also provides and option to save the position of various docks which can act as a user preference. For eg, you may like to position solution explorer on left side whereas i may want it on right side. this get stored in a conf file which gets read next time when you start the application.
Incase you using MFC, then visual studio 2008 SP1 provides you with docking framwork and within that use the treeview control.
XAML also provides a docking framework. But i am not sure, you need to verify.
Win32 API does not have any native docking framework.

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