It's possible to show with maybe a key combination all the control names in the design view of a windows forms application?
Some key that makes visible the control names or some extension?
Related
I want to make a composite control which I could drag to form multiple times, but this control should reside in one project only. I do not like the idea of making a control, and installing it to be visible to all projects in a Visual Studio 2010 Toolbox.
So, I assumed that the UserControl is what I needed. I created one, but now can't drag it to a form or find it in the Toolbox.
Tools > Options > Windows Forms Designer > AutoToolboxPopulate is set to True.
I had to compile the project to make UserControl appear in the Toolbox.
What is the winforms control that Visual Studio uses as a properties editor? It is a two column table with the names on the left side and the editible value on the right side.
It is a PropertyGrid.
i was trying to complete a tutorial on custom controls and all of the tutorials that ive found say that you have to choose a project template called "windows control library". I don't have that template as an option! I am using VS2010 professional. Any ideas?
The "Windows Control Library" project template is used to quickly get started creating custom controls for use in Windows Forms (WinForms) applications. It creates a project that is automatically populated with the necessary references and files.
To create a new project of this type, you first have to pick one of the .NET languages—it doesn't matter which—either C#, VB.NET or C++/CLI.
Then, select the "Windows" category to narrow down the scope of the project types that are listed.
Finally, select the project type called "Windows Forms Control Library".
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 have created a custom graph control in WPF. Now I want to show it's properties in the properties window of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE so a user can change the properties at design time. How can I do this with WPF custom controls?
Please help.
Rangana.
You don't need to do anything: Visual Studio will work it out by inspecting the control's API.
However, you can ship a .design.dll assembly to customise or improve the experience. See WPF Designer Extensibility in the Visual Studio help, or Jim Nakashima's article for a more tutorial walkthrough. But to reiterate this additional metadata is optional and your users will be able to configure most basic properties without it.