How to undock WinForms form designer in Visual Studio? - winforms

How can i undock the WinForms form design in Visual Studio (so that it's not embedded in a tab, or encased in a "penalty box") so that it reacts similar to how Delphi-7 could undock the form?
e.g. This is what i have:
Note: The yellow highlight indicating the area of the form visible in the designer, red indicating the area of the form obscured by the penalty box.
This is what i want:
Note: A free-floating designable form, circa 2003.

Click-and-hold on its tab, and drag it.
Is that what you’re looking for?
EDIT:
Here's an Alt+PrtScrn:
Edit: Here's a snipping tool screenshot:

Related

How to inspect a tooltip using Live Visual Tree?

Visual Studio's Live Visual Tree is great for inspecting UI elements. But how can I inspect a tooltip in my application?
I turn on "Enable Selection" in the mini-toolbar that appears that the top of my WPF application's window, but with that turned on, tooltips no longer appear.
If you make the tooltip visible first, it will disappear when you move the mouse to the mini-toolbar.
So this is a Catch-22. Any thoughts appreciated.
Live Visual Tree is a new feature in Visual Studio 2015, I'd say they are very late in catching up for giving tools for WPF Developers.
Please send a bug in Microsoft Connect.
I would recommend to look at Snoop The WPF Spy Utility. It will give you the ability to inspect the tooltip and it's well tested working tool.
I agree with the Snoop recommendation.
If you are new to Snoop, I would add that a valuable hidden feature is to hold down Shift+Ctrl as you hover over your app. This will allow your Snoop window to zero in on the exact element quickly, without the need to manually navigate your visual tree.
You will actually want to snoop the element that has the ToolTip property set, not the ToolTip itself. For example, if the ToolTip is on a TextBlock, simply navigate the Tree on the left (or use the Shift+Ctrl tip) to that particular TextBlock. The ToolTip itself does not need to be showing on the screen. Then on the right side in the Properties Tab, you can filter down to the ToolTip property. If the ToolTip property happens to have a binding, you can see the binding from Snoop as well.

What is the thing at the top of WPF Windows in Visual Studio 2015

Is it useful, and how can I toggle it on/off? I would just google it, unfortunately "thing at top of screen in WPF" doesn't really turn up anything useful.
It is a new WPF debugger tool found in Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. It shows the live visual tree which can be very helpful for debugging WPF applications.
You can find the feature in this changelog: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2015-update2-vs.aspx
Edit: To disable this, click the left-most button in the dropdown, and then click the left-most button on the resulting live visual tree panel.

Windows Form Toolbox is empty

In my Visual Studio 2015, Windows Forms Tool Box (where we have controls like Text box, button etc) is not showing up.
I tried checking all the check marks in Views->ToolBars, but no use.
Please help.
Thanks,
Make sure you have opened a Windows Forms project.
Open View menu and check Toolbox or use Ctrl+Alt+X shortcut and you will see the toolbox.
The toolbox will fill with controls when you open a Form or UserControl in design view.

WPF: Do VS 2010 and Blend 4 really integrate well?

I'm new to WPF, so this is my first project.
I started with the coding side of things using VS. I am overall pretty satisfied with the way VS is used to build a WPF app, however a big part of WPF is also animation.
So to my relief, I was able to open the solution I created using VS 2010, in Expression Blend 4.
I opened it, but then I noticed the form design view in Blend 4. My heart sank. Please don't tell me WPF 4 is still so immature as a product that you cannot yet work decently with WPF projects created in VS 2010?
See the screen shots:
Here is good old VS 2010 form design view. As you can see there is a menu and a label control on the form.
Here on the other hand is the same form open in Blend 4:
As you can see, no design time support it seems for ANY existing elements. The form besides being black, seems to not contain my menu or label.
Have I done something wrong, or is Blend this immature?
My course of action seems to be learning the XAML and using pure VS 2010 for animation, but that means that Blend 4 would be a failed product in my eyes.
Update:
Here is the full screen , so this is after opening the MainWindow.xaml in Blend 4.
Ok well I figured it out.
I am guessing its also a bug in Blend 4.
In VS 2010 my Window visibility was initially hidden, this is because I have a custom splash screen which first loads, then sets the visibility to true.
So design mode imo of Blend should not pay attention to the Windows visibility property, this is a run time property really.
Setting the visibility to true of the form / window. and the results are better.

Toolbar Button with Context Menu? Like New Project Button in Visual Studio

I need a toolbar button similiar to the "New Project" button in the standard Visual Studio toolbar. When clicked, it pops up a dialog. However, it also has a small little down-arrow next to the icon graphic that, when clicked, expands a context menu with more options.
Is there a standard control available with this functionality?
I don't think there's built in functionality for a SplitButton in WPF currently. Here's another thread that may help you out though:
WPF SplitButton?
You could combine a couple of controls together to make one fairly quickly. Might as well make a new UserContol out of it that can be re-used throughout your app as well.
Also, a quick search on WPF SplitButton will return a lot of examples on how to make one or you could get one off of CodeProject or CodePlex (though I'm not sure if they'll come with a image property automatically).

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