I'm working on an existing WinForms application and I am having some weird issues with Infragistics controls in a WinForms app.
When I open a form or usercontrol in the project that has Infragistics controls on it, it looks like
this http://sdrv.ms/S7gvmS
I cannot access any of the controls in the design surface. Clicking does nothing. And, all of the controls appear in the lower area.
So I created a new test solution and dropped some Infragisstics controls on and got this http://sdrv.ms/SRdo2y
Anyone know what's going on?
When I've run in to similar issues before it's tended to be a license or version problem, the Infragistics libraries contain code stopping them working at design-time if a valid license isn't installed. To resolve this, I'd first recommend deleting all of the *.licx files in your solution. These can be easily corrupted especially if you're using source control and should be regenerated correctly when you go in at design time. If that fails, then I'd try uninstalling and reinstalling Infragistics ensuring the version installed matches those of your projects' reference.
P.S. Realise this is far too late to help the original poster but hopefully will help people coming across similar issues in the future.
This happens when Visual Studio cannot find the Design assembly. The components refer to a designer and if Visual Studio cannot find the designer, it makes the assumption that the object is a component instead of a control and places it in the system tray.
Typically, this indicates that something when wrong with your installation of the components, so the usual solution is to re-install.
Related
I'm using thbe Microsoft Ribbon for WPF (System.Windows.Controls.Ribbon) and VS2015. Since I removed unnecessary depencies from my project (like Dynamic Data Display etc, things not related to the ribbon) it does not render correctly in the Designer anymore. All RibbonButtons get rendered as usual buttons and so on.
I used the Clean Solution option and also rebuild multiple times, without sucess. While execution everything is fine, just the designer can't handle the ribbon anymore. What could have caused this strange behaviour?
This is how my ribbon looks now in the designer:
And this is how it's supposed to look and looked before:
Update: it clearly seems to be a visual studio bug, as I opened the project on another machine with the same VS version and there everything is fine.
deleting %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Designer\ShadowCache wasn't working but this:
close solution (at best every instance of VS, you never know)
delete bin\ and obj\ in solution folder ("Clean Solution" isn't enough nowadays. Why should it? It isn't anything anyone would ever do if VS is doing strange things. Maybe I should fall back to kill -9 devenv.exe && git clean -fX as default m( )
Reopen solution and hope for the best.
This drove me nuts. The only real google hits for this problem was this SO question, another one without any answer, 500+ pseudomirrors of SO and thousands of false positives... sorry for the rant.
The problem was resolved by clearing the Visual Studio Designer Cache.
This is done by deleting the subfolders in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Designer\ShadowCache
Recently I started a project in WinForms. I'm coming from WPF background and I find some things new to me. For example every time I want to change a property of WinForms control I have to scroll up and down to find it.
It drives me mad. I would rather type first few letters of looked up property and edit it in a couple of seconds. Is there a way to speed up this annoying process?
There is no easy way to filter properties of control. I know how you feel, as I switch between WPF and WinForms from project to project. But you can always either Categorize them or sort them alphabetically... I am sure you'll get used to it eventually, but you have to understand though, Windows Forms are not as "innovative" as WPF is. Therefore you'll see some things are rather more "traditional" than WPF in WinForms! Sorry mate :)
There is a VS Extension called RapidDesign. It is a payed project but I think it's worth the price. It does exactly what you need and even more. (Note!!! I am not connected in anyway with the author/company that develops this product)
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c820e3a0-add2-4a43-943c-029e296ab00d
You can download the extension directly from VisualStudio galery or you can install it from inside VS by going to Tools->Extensions And Updates...->Online->and search for RapidDesign
I'm new to the Windows world, and I think I'm getting lost in the weeds on a problem. I'd love some advice from people with experience with C++/CLI and WPF and XAML.
I have some win32 code, and I need to run a WPF GUI. I found this MS walkthrough sample, which uses C++/CLI. I adapted it to my purposes, and it works great.
Next, I wanted to rip out the programmatic WPF stuff and use XAML instead. This is so I can hand off the XAML to a designer person and take myself out of the UI design loop, where I most assuredly don't belong. After reading the "WPF Interoperation Projects" section of WPF and Win32 Interoperation on MSDN, I decided to go with the XamlReader::Load option and load uncompiled XAML at runtime. My XAML markup is a Canvas UIElement which I programmatically add as a child of my root Grid C++/CLI element. This works great.
Now I want to add event handler to controls in the XAML. This is where I have started to run into trouble. I'm sure that my general ignorance of the Windows world is 95% of what's killing me here.
I started with Rob Relyea's page outlining the various XAML-and-event-handler options.
I decided to try compiling the XAML as a C# DLL. It's basically the same XAML as what I used in the runtime Load case. I instantiate the object and programmatically add as it as a child, just like before. But ... I get nothing but a black window. No exceptions get thrown either. I'm baffled.
My question is, am I even headed down the right path? The page on XAML-and-event-handlers says you can use event handlers defined in uncompiled XAML in .Net Framework 4. Should I bite the bullet and just go to VS 2010 (I'm presently on VS 2008) so I can use .Net Framework 4 and just stick with uncompiled XAML? Are there any gotchas with doing things that way?
Or, if you do think the compiled C# DLL is a reasonable path, do you have any ideas on how I can debug the problems I'm having?
Or, is there a better and completely different approach?
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Polly
I think the right answer for this depends on some issues that only you can decide, but I'll start with the assumption that your C++ code base is big and complex enough that it is worth preserving.
Beyond that the next decision point is do you have UI (perhaps GDI) code in the C++ your preserving or only non-UI code. If you are attempting to preserve only non-UI code then I would consider pushing more UI responsibilty into C#. Perhaps you go so far as to build your views, event handlers, and maybe even view models in C#. This will enable you to take better advantage of the VS tooling.
If you've got extensive UI code in C++ to preserve then your current path makes a more sense. I don't think it will be impossible, but you'll have quite a challenge ahead of you. The key example here is Visual Studio 2010. It is the premiere example of a mixed application and has GDI and WPF side by side unlike any other app I've ever seen or heard of. There is a series of blog posts that I found pretty interesting that describe some aspects of what the Visual Studio team did to achieve this integration at The Visual Studio Blog.
I also came across this video Henry Sowizral on Refacing C++ with WPF in Expression Design that I have not seen myself, but discusses putting a WPF UI on top of an existing MFC C++ app.
Good luck.
I don't have any specific advice on the first part of your question other than to say that putting more responsibility in C# would allow you to build a small stub app if necessary which could go a long way toward diagnosing problems.
Thanks to everyone for the responses. On the matter of getting stuck on the C# DLL, I found this C++/CLI sample: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970266.aspx. Using that, I found my error, and was able to load the WPF without problems.
However, the whole motivation for loading the C# DLL was that I had understood that that was the way to attach event handlers programmatically. Following AresAvatar's suggestion, I found that I could use FindName to attach the handlers -- both within the C# DLL, but it also worked with my original loose-XAML approach. So, I didn't need the C# DLL after all!
It's all working nicely now. Again, thanks for all of your help and suggestions.
I'm a big fan of the rather obscure "Document Outline" window in VS 2008 (it's buried in the View -> Other Windows menu).
It's the only way I know to get a view of the containment heirarchy for a complicated WinForm that has a lot of nested controls.
Some months ago, this just stopped working for the most complicated form in my WinForms project. Now it just displays "There are no items to show for the selected document", no matter what I select in the designer.
No clue as to what broke it - the form contains a mix of common MS controls and some third party controls (mainly DevExpress). Several SplitContainers, but Document Outline originally had no problem with these.
Anybody else seen this, and any suggestions on how to fix it?
After some poking around, I solved the problem myself.
I just started deleting controls from the form, to see what would happen.
Turns out the 3rd party grid I'm using caused the problem - when I reconfigured it, the problem went away. (Looks like a bug in the control, which I've reported to the vendor).
Interesting...misbehaving controls can break the VS IDE, not just your apps.
I created a form in WPF and it looked great. When I opened it in Visual Studio 2010, it look alot different than what I created.
Any ideas why this would happen? Should I ignore how it shows up in VS? This makes me wonder if either is how the user will actually see it.
Any suggestions?
Thanks again!
Eroc
The Visual Studio view of your WPF form is the designer view. Designer views of WPF forms, or really any other design of a UI component, will often differ in dislpay vs. the actual running component. Some of these differences are intentional to make design easier and some are just limitations of not having the WPF element actually running in a program (lack of certain runtime data bindings for example).
I wouldn't worry about it unless it starts looking incorrect when running.