Merging *.Designer.cs files - winforms

I am facing difficulty in merging Windows Forms designer files. Because whenever we work on the same windows form and modify the design visual studio will re-order the designer code at that time we spent many hours to merge that 100 lines of code.it's very painful.
So can you provide any guidance on merging these files? I'm looking for anyone with experience with this issue who may have found some tips or workarounds.
thanks,

Related

Is there a free WinForms control similar to Telerik's RadDock?

I'm looking to create an interface which has drag-drop-dock functionality like Visual Studio. Telerik offers exactly what I'm looking for:
http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms/dock.aspx
Trouble is, it will cost $1000. This is a side project and I don't have a budget for that. Does anyone know of a similar control which is free and/or open source? Google didn't turn up any results.
Thanks
I ended up going more low-level and using OpenTk GameWindow and GWEN, which contains docking.
GWEN - GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense
https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN
It's absolutely great, but unfortunately the original project is abandoned. There are a ton of forks at different states. I've personally had a lot of success with it.

TFS - Updating Work Item Types For All Project/Collections

Background
In our environment, we are constantly making changes to our work item types (WITs), due to changes in our procedures. We currently have two main collections; one collection has around 5 projects, and the other one has around 20. For each project, we have 7 different WITs.
It gets kind of cumbersome when I have to make the a change to the templates, because I have to change them on every project/collection that we have. Typically, I just modify one template, and use the command line (witadmin) to import that xml file into each project. It's really difficult to know whether or not WITs are current on all projects.
What I am looking for
I would like to find a way to easily modify the WITs once, and have
it update all of the projects with those changes.
It would also be nice to have a GUI to modify these WIT. Does TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 handle WIT modification better?
What I Already Know
I am pretty comfortable running TFS/DOS commands, so I ultimately could
create a batch script that would automate that for me. This would
probably be a last resort scenario.
Another option would be to write an app using the TFS SDK and import the WITs to all projects.
Current Configuration TFS 2010 and VS 2012 (We are soon upgrading to TFS 2012)
Fortunately Grant Holliday did an excellent post on that topic.
A quick method is automating your WIT export\import with batch files (ExportWITDs.cmd, ImportWITDs.cmd). Then use the Checkin.cmd example to check-in the changes to a dedicated folder for WITs on the source control.
If your'e looking for a tidier, more robust solution, go for the TFS-SDK. A Visual Studio extension that adds an Export\Import\Sync All WITs buttons would be great.

How to create a setup of an Windows application using PowerBuilder

I am a newbie for PowerBuilder and for Windows application. I have few projects which consists corresponding code in it and after merging all that I get the final product. The problem I am facing right now is that I don't know how to make a setup of my Windows app using PowerBuilder. If I can get step by step procedure with tiny explanation, I will be able to achieve it already. Have tried Google but ended up with complex confusion. I have created the .exe, but that .exe does not work on any other computer. So please guys help me out.
Thanks
There are two parts to creating a setup program for your application: defining the files and other resources that need to deployed, and building those resources into a setup executable package.
For defining files and resources, you've made it impossible for anyone to even take a shot by referring to two very different (but similar origins) versions of the product in your tags: PowerBuilder (aka PowerBuilder Classic) and PowerBuilder.NET. The deployment requirements for apps built from each of these is very different. However, even if we knew, the best advice is to go through the manuals and review what is required of the features of your specific application. (e.g. if you don't use rich text, deploying the files required to support it would be a waste). A generic list is, IMHO, just bad advice.
As far as building a setup package goes, the first decision is which package building software to pick (none comes with PowerBuilder). Any Windows setup package builder should do. I've used InstallShield and Inno, vastly preferring the latter (after many years of using the former). I know you want steps to walk you through, but a walk through is impossible before picking the software, and frankly, walk throughs of these setup building software has been done elsewhere much better than I'd do.
The bottom line is that the answer isn't as simple as you seem to have been hoping, but it is attainable.
Good luck,
Terry.

Dotfuscating BAML in WPF application

'Lo again,
My Dotfuscation efforts continue! So I'm currently working on obfuscating a reasonable complicated WPF application consisting of ~38 assemblies. Now that I've overcome my performance issues (Speeding up obfuscation process), I've now moved on to testing out the BAML obfuscation capabilities of Dotfuscator v4.10.
Trouble is, it ain't working - the errors (well, warnings) that are generated are all of the same form, for which I can find nothing on the 'net that discusses:
BamlAnalysis flagged something in Data Binding Path: SOMEFIELDNAME in
SOMERESOURCEPATHTOBAML.baml for the following reasons:
Could not resolve, may have to manually exclude.
Anyone come across this and have any insight what the heck it wants me to change?
[EDIT:] Even setting up manual excludes on the properties its complaining about does not remove the warning...and it doesn't appear as if the underlying BAML is altered at all (at least not by visual check via reflector).
[EDIT2:] Also, should state that Dotfuscator is a requirement here, so alternative tools probably won't help me.
You can try using the latest version of Eazfuscator.NET to obfuscate complex WPF applications. XAML renaming is powered by a perfect analyzer which takes bindings, commands and every other aspect of XAML into account to deliver the precise results.

Building SL4 + RIAServices app takes too long on VS2010

Got a Win7 box with VS2010 Premium installed on it.
Building desktop apps works just fine.
But we got this solution with 15 SL4 and 21 desktop projects... Building the SL part of it takes too long. This is very irritating and encourages to drop TDD since every time I run a test it takes ~3 seconds for msbuild to find out that nothing changed and the project should be skipped. The projects are very small and there's nothing fancy in them and we hadn't any problems before we switched from VS2008+SL3.
I've heard people complaining abound VS2010 speed in general, but nothing about SL4 build time.
Is anyone experiencing same problems and is there any workaround for this?
Do you need that many projects? As a rule of thumb, less is better. You say that the projects are very small, that would be an indication to me that you probably don't need that many.
Don't use it for managing dependencies (cycle avoidance). If you're trying to manage 'units of development' or logical groupings, use namespaces instead.
Physical/project separation is good for keeping test code out of production code, and managing units of deployment, but don't separate it until you're getting something out of it.
Patricks Smaccia wrote a good article on when and when not to create assemblies.
Another way to tackle the problem is to break your solution up into multiple solutions, and
use references to the dlls produced by the other solutions. That way, you only build part of it at a time. If you need to work across many dlls at the same time, this is inconvenient, but it's a sign that something is likely to be wrong with the design of your code.
This post on speeding vs.net up with many projects may also help.

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