For Controls in WinForms while using the designer I would like to display both Properties and Events for a control at the same time.
The New Window option is greyed out in Visual Studios Window Drop down when the properties window has focus not allowing me to create a second instance.
I find I spend a lot of time switching between the two. I use the form designer extensively and events to navigate to specific code quickly. Any help would be appreciated!
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In my VSTO projects (Office 2007 / 2010) I would like to use a small popup control (think Tooltip like features; fade animation and mouse interaction).
I would prefer to use WPF. If I were to do this in WPF I would create a custom Popup Control.
In VSTO, as far as I understand it, I must use a WPF window and then have 2 options, either I put this window in a Windows Form Container or I get the Hwnd of my office app and I add this Hwnd to the Owner property of a WPF Window. Am I correct here?
Creating a whole window, animating it on and off the screen etc to look like a ToolTip seems to be overkill.
So my question is how should I do this. I would prefer WPF.
I don't know if this would work but my first thought is to build a very tiny WPF window which is transparent and start it with the Office App. I can then build a Popup Control (which is a child of this tiny window) which I show and not show at a mouse position. Pretty sure a popup can appear outside the bounds of its parent window.
Just wanted to tidy up my own question with what I did. In the VSTO addin project I added a reference to WindowsBase, PresentationFramework and presentation core.
And then I just follow any tutorial or example that adds a WPF Popup. By popup I mean a System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.Popup. For the Placement I used PlacementMode.Absolute and then used a window point to set its position.
This pretty much answers my question. Of course this popup is literally floating above your office window so you will need to make sure that you control it for example if the office window moves, is minimized and the like.
Must every control in the Visual Studio WinForms toolbox descend from Control?
Does Visual Studio support window-less controls?
Every control you add to the Toolbox in Visual Studio:
must1 descend from Control, which is a wrapper around a windowed control.
Unfortunately, Windowed controls are very "heavy"; having a lot of them, especially nested, causes performance in WinForms to suffer.
In the past i've dealt with the problem by creating aggregate custom controls. The custom control internally contains other window-less controls:
an image (windowless version of a PictureBox)
title label (windowless version of a Label)
subtitle label (windowless version of a Label)
border (windowless version of a Panel)
These are useful to mitigate performance problems in WinForms, but they're stuck inside code.
i would like to do what other development environments allow, is a version of Control that doesn't create a Windows window. i would like the ability for the Visual Studio toolbox to accept **window-less* controls.
i know that if i really wanted window-less controls: i should switch to WPF. But that's overkill.
Does Visual Studio WinForms support window-less controls?
1 or not
Yes and No.
First, check out this article from the venerable Raymond Chen: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/02/11/371042.aspx
Yes. You are welcome to create "controls" that do not derive from Control. I have created several windowless controls in my application that natively support clicking, layering, etc., I draw them to an offscreen buffer, and then paint them directly on some parent Form or Control (such as a PictureBox). This is straightforward to do but not simple, as you will need to manage everything yourself in code.
No. Any windowless controls will not be supported in the Windows Forms designer for any of the Control-derived controls designers (such as placing them on a Panel or Form) so you won't have drag-and-drop form design.
As Hans has pointed out, the ToolStrip and MenuStrip (a windowless control) are such examples. Notice that when you create a new MenuStrip on a Form, the MenuStrip is placed in the Component tray underneath the form. The MenuStrip has a custom set of Designer classes associated with it to support the custom painting and "Type Here" functionality, as well as the dialog boxes to add and remove menu items. Note that the "child" windowless controls, such as the ToolStripButton, are not available in the ToolBox for drag-and-drop support directly onto the form - only the custom designer knows about it. The custom designer for the MenuStrip also supports selecting the child windowless controls so that you can edit the properties of each item in the Properties window.
I can't imagine this is suitable for your situation (unless you are creating some controls for resale), but if you are very determined, you can create designer support in much the same way for your set of windowless controls:
Create a class that derives from Component that will be used to manage your Windowless controls. For example, you could call this class WindowlessWidgetManager. After you compile, this control will be in your toolbox. The WindowlessWidgetManager can contain a collection of your windowless controls, and provide painting and other UI support for a canvas such as a Form or PictureBox.
Create a designer class that derives from ComponentDesigner that supports things such adding and removing your custom controls at design time. For more information, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.design.componentdesigner(v=VS.90).aspx
This is a very lengthy process with a number of caveats, but if that is what you wish to achieve, the functionality is there.
If I create a WPF user control, it appears automatically in the Visual Studio toolbox.
Is there a way to make other controls appear automatically in the Visual Studio toolbox?
Conversely, is there a way to hide a user control from the toolbox?
You can right click on the toolbox and select Choose Items... Then from there you will get a dialog that allows you to select which controls to show or hide.
Per comment below if you are trying to figure out how to do this for a Third Party that you are providing your control to check out this MSDN article that describes packaging your control:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165358.aspx
Auto population is described here (at the end), but to summarize you can add DesignTimeVisible(false) to your UserControl to prevent it from being added to the Toolbox.
Your controls should be added just like your UserControls, assuming they meet the requirements at the end of the link above, which are:
To appear in the Auto-Population
Toolbox process a type must derive
from FrameworkElement and:
Are public and have a default public or internal constructor or are
internal and have either a default
public or internal constructor
Types deriving from Window or Page are ignored
FrameworkElements in other .exe projects are ignore
Internal classes will only be displayed when the active designer is
for an item in the same project
Friend Assemblies are not taken into account for Toolbox
Auto-Population
If you are building reusable controls (where your end-users will simply add a reference to your assembly), then you'd need to tell Visual Studio that it should load your controls into the Toolbox. There is a tutorial for WinForms controls on doing this here, but the concepts are the same. A VSIX installer tutorial can be found here.
A lot of the resources out there are for older versions of Visual Studio, but again the same concepts should apply. You simply need to update version information where appropriate.
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.
I am trying to create a WPF wizard control in visual studio. I am successful except I would like to navigate the pages in design time by clicking the next and previous buttons. The pages are being written in xaml. I can navigate the pages by going to the properties window and changing the selected index, but I would like something more user-friendly. I remember doing something similar in a winforms project having something to do with overriding maybe wndproc and listening to mouse click events from the designer.
So I've been googling and I can't seem to google the right words to bring this up.
Can anyone please help!
You need to create a custom Adorner as described here. There are two walkthroughs there that should help.
Ultimately, you would need to overlay a transparent button on top of your actual buttons. Then in the click handlers you'd update your selected item/index.