Visual Studio

Attaching to a process from VS using macro

Marcin Celej — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:04:00 GMT

I found interesting macro. It allows you to attach to a process from VS. I use it very often to attach to NUnit gui. I have a toolbar button in my VS that invokes the macro. I found it quite useful.

'This subroutine attaches to the first nunit-gui.exe process found.
Sub AttachToNUnit()
    Dim process As EnvDTE.Process

    For Each process In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses
        If (process.Name.ToLower().EndsWith("nunit-gui.exe")) Then
            process.Attach()
            Exit Sub
        End If
    Next

    MsgBox("No nunit-gui.exe found")
End Sub

Allowing end-user to change application UI

Marcin Celej — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 01:16:00 GMT

In application I write actually there is a requirement that end-user should have ability to change the UI look. My strange-user can design ui elements on each form and user control in the application. He also 'needs' to add new controls to the UI. Let's not discuss sense of the requirement as I don't like it anyway. I didn't implement the feature yet but I found in the MSDN Magazine an artcile about hosting VS designers in .NET application (The Perfect Host: Create And Host Custom Designers With The .NET Framework 2.0). There is also great sample (amazingly simple) that shows how to create application that mimics VS designer behavior (toolbox, generated code viewing, designer surface, property grid, etc.)

In the host application I created a Form (dragged some controls on the Form designer surface from the toolbox):

Then I saved the designed Form to xml (I could save it to .cs file, as the VS does, but I am interested not in application recompilation but in runtime enhancement. In such case saving my forms to xml suits me better). The Form serialized to xml looks like this:

  <Object type="System.Windows.Forms.Form" name="Form1" children="Controls">
    <Object type="System.Windows.Forms.TextBox" name="TextBox1" children="Controls">
      <Property name="Location">62, 6</Property>
      <Property name="Size">100, 20</Property>
      <Property name="DataBindings">
        <Property name="DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode">OnValidation</Property>
      </Property>
      <Property name="Name">TextBox1</Property>
      <Property name="Text">Marcin Celej</Property>
      <Property name="TabIndex">1</Property>
    </Object>
    <Object type="System.Windows.Forms.Label" name="Label1" children="Controls">
      <Property name="TabIndex">0</Property>
      <Property name="Size">68, 23</Property>
      <Property name="Name">Label1</Property>
      <Property name="Text">Name:</Property>
      <Property name="Location">12, 9</Property>
      <Property name="DataBindings">
        <Property name="DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode">OnValidation</Property>
      </Property>
    </Object>
    <Property name="Name">Form1</Property>
    <Property name="DataBindings">
      <Property name="DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode">OnValidation</Property>
    </Property>
    <Property name="ClientSize">292, 122</Property>
  </Object>

The xml serialization is achieved by a class derieved from BasicDesignerLoader and is replaceable. In such way we ar able to do with the designed Form whatever we need.

That's the beginning of the story. Now I need to learn more about the designer hosting to check if it is what I need. It looks very interesting at a first glance (which I presented here) and may be used in many other places. I will try to use it in my application and we'll see if user will be able to change the UI, I will be able to handle it easily, and everyone will be happy.

NDoc for .NET 2.0

Marcin Celej — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 06:39:00 GMT

For those of you who use .NET 2.0 and want to document their code with triple slashes (///) there is good news. NDoc (free tool for creating documentation from the triple slashes) is being ported to .NET 2.0. I used the NDoc in .NET 1.1 and it is great tool (especially that it is free). Each of libraries I developed was well documented so I could see (from the documentation) at which point with the development I am. I encourage everyone to comment the code and to try the NDoc, but remember it's not finished yet.

The latest version of the NDoc can be found here: Much improved NDoc for .Net 2.0

I tried it and I can say it's not perfect but at least it didn't crash on my projects and it generated chm documentation. I hope guys will finish the port so we could create msdn-look-like documentation.

Visual Studio editor guides

Marcin Celej — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 07:33:00 GMT

I found interesting feature of Visual Studio editor. You can enable it to display vertical lines (guides):

Unfortunatelly to enable the lines you must change registry:

1. Find registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor
2. Add string value there: "Guides"="RGB(220,220,220) 4, 8, 12"

Here is a link to the original blog i found it on: Guidelines – a hidden feature for the Visual Studio Editor