I am working on a WinForm Application.
The Form has many fields/components but is poorly built.
for example a field is used as user name on one case and used as folder path on the other case. Code is quite poorly maintaned.
Is is possible that when i run the application and GUI appears, i can use a tool like 'spy++' which can show me 'names' of the components (not ids). For instance the name of a button or name of a label.
Or if i can use SPY++ for 'names' please tell me?
I would solve the problem by adding a ToolTip control to your form and iterating over each control and adding a Tool Tip message to each control that is the name of the control.
First, add a ToolTip object to your form (from the Tools section of the designer.) You can rename it, but for the sake of my demo, I left it as the default name toolTip1.
Next, add a method similar to the one I'm posting below to the code page of your form. (I'm assuming this is for C# but the code is simple and can easily be modified for VB or C++).
public void AddNameToToolTip(Control c)
{
toolTip1.SetToolTip(c, c.Name);
foreach (Control child in c.Controls) AddNameToToolTip(child);
}
Finally, from within the Form constructor, add the following line of code after the call to InitializeComponent().
AddNameToToolTip(this);
This will add a ToolTip message to each control in your form. All you should have to do is hover your mouse over each control and the ToolTip will pop up a message after a second or two displaying the name of the underlying control.
Alternatively, you can recursively adding a MouseHover event to each control and when the event is fired, write the name of the control to the debugger. This would also work if you are already using a ToolTip control within your form.
Related
I'm working on an old project that supports Windows Forms.
This project contains some ResourceManager for the support of a few localizations. The idea is that you call ResourceManager["SomeResource"] instead of Resource.SomeResource and it returns you a localized string.
And these localized strings are used in the code of the initialization of the form. For example, you have Form1, and in Form1.Design.cs there is some code like this:
Label label1 = new Label();
label1.Text = ResourceManager["SomeResource"];
So the label will be created with an already localized string in the Text.
And we need to add the functionality of changing the UI language without reloading the Form.
We can just set the every Text property of every controls again. But it's a lot of code, the form contains a lot of controls.
We can call the Form.InitializeComponents(), this method will recreate all controls with new localized strings, but in some cases, it works slowly because it reloads some big data again.
Is there some other way to refresh all UI controls and get the new localized strings? Do Windows Forms support some mechanism like Binding in the WPF to create the "connection" between the Text properties and localized resources?
I think that you can achieve this by use of Invalidate() either on the form itself or on a container control that your other controls may be encompassed by.
I have made a FormBase, from which I inherit a FomBaseList and a FormBaseDetail.
All other forms in the project are derived from FormBaseList or FormBaseDetail.
Now it seems that VS has huge problems with that, and my biggest problem is that VS keeps writing property values from the Ancestor form into the designer.cs from the child form.
for example, in FormBaseList I have this property/value :
this.gttDXGridView1.OptionsView.ShowAutoFilterRow = true;
I expect that in a derived form, for example FormClientList, there is no mention for this value in the designer.cs, because it should fetch the value from its parent. In other words, just plain simple basic OOP.
And I also expect that when I change the property in FormClientList to
this.gttDXGridView1.OptionsView.ShowAutoFilterRow = false;
that this is seen as an override from the baseclass.
However, VS keeps overwriting the property in FormClientList.Designer.cs with the value found in FormBaseList.Designer.cs.
This breaks the rules of OOP in my opinion, other tools that support Visual Inheritance like Delphi for example do this correct.
How can I stop VS from doing this ?
The properties are changed using the designer.
All controls are DevExpress controls, or derived from a DevExpress control.
Another example, which works just opposite so its very strange.
For example put a Button on the BaseForm and give it an image.
The button with the image appears on all derived forms.
Now change the image on the button of the BaseForm.
You would expect the image to change on all derived forms also, but that does not happen.
I discovered that again VS has written the property value of the button in all derived designer.cs files, and this time it does not overwrites them.
I created a ticket about this at the DevExpress forum, and they where able to reproduce it.
It is now passed on to their developers.
https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/T692940/devexpress-controls-break-visual-inheritance-in-visual-studio
It also seems I was not the first to report a similar problem.
https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/T692244/imageoptions-are-serialized-in-a-successor-when-visual-inheritance-is-in-effect
I’ve met strange behaviour for WPF design-time in Visual Studio 2010: after an instance of the Popup class was created, and I switched the code tab in Visual Studio to a different file, the Popup still remains on the screen!
I have a piece of code, which allows to reproduce this, but I am not sure if I should paste it here (it's not so short), so maybe I'll just give a link to it: here.
For unknown reasons beyond mere mortals' comprehension, Microsoft has decided this is the default behavior of the Popup class in WPF. You have to implement the "hiding" logic yourself. I suggest handling the Window.LocationChanged, Window.Activated and Window.Deactivated events of the Window containing the Popup and close it yourself.
Edit: To clarify myself, the Window events you need to handle are the events of the window that contains the Popup's PlacementTarget element. Usually when you create a popup, you set it relative to some element contained in an application's Window (similar to how the tooltips work). If this is your case, then my solution is correct, but I forgot to mention this point about the PlacementTarget.
In your code behind; you can simple check this boolean:
DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(this);
"this" represent the object containing the popup. For example the Window.
If true you can say:
myPopUp.IsOpen = false;
For Store Apps/WinRT:
Windows.ApplicationModel.DesignMode.DesignModeEnabled
I wrote a window UI by c++ windows form. I'd like to create a string table to localize the Form. My steps are:
1. I set the form localizable=true.
2. Add a new .resx file named (project name).en-US.resx and edit the string table.
3. Set the text of components using the code like
this->button1->Text = resources->GetString("CLOSE");
After I finish setting the text, I build the project and execute it, the button truly show the text. But if I modify the UI(like add component or change the position of the button), the text will disappear after I build again. What's wrong with the code? How can the text always show? Otherwise I need to set again if I modify the form><. Thanks for anybody's help.
Do not make changes to the code that is generated by the designer. Anything inside the InitializeComponent() method. Such changes will disappear when you make another change in the designer and it re-generates the method. Code in the constructor is okay, put it after the InitializeComponent() call.
The better procedure to localize a form is to let the designer generate the .resx file and the code. Change the form's Language property to the desired language, then change the Text property in the property grid. No additional code is required.
I have a custom list control derived from Control class.
I need to make it accessible to people with disabilities through MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility).
So far I understand that I need to create class that inherits from ControlAccessibleObject and then return its instance in Control.CreateAccessibilityInstance method override.
The problem is that I have implemented this and it seems not work with Windows Narrator tool.
For example, when I click on an item in standard ListView, the Narrator speaks out the selected item text.
But when I click on item in my control, nothing happens (although the item text is requested in my ControlAccessibleObject implementation)
I thought I need to implement IAccessible as well, but I looked on .NET refrence source code and the ListView does not implement this interface. I thought maybe this is implemented in the wrapped Win32 control, so I took a look on similar control - DataGridView - but this does not implement IAccessible as well.
DataGridView have accessibility support, but although I copied all the important code of DataGridViewAccessibleObject, it still does not work in my control.
Do anyone have more experience with custom control accessibility in WinForms?
Okay, I found it: The Control.AccessibilityNotifyClients method does the magic. One have to override this method in a derived control.
However, to make screen readers speak the text, I had to call:
AccessibilityNotifyClients(AccessibleEvents.Focus, index);
AccessibilityNotifyClients(AccessibleEvents.Selection, index);
Here the index is an index of newly selected item.
I found this code in the .NET reference source of CheckedListBox. When I used Focus or Selection event solely, the screen reader have not reacted. The spoken text also depend on the AccessibleObject state that corresponds to a newly selected item.