Move code from .vb to .Designer.vb

If you still have Visual Studio 2003 projects and you are just in the process of upgrading / modernizing them, then the following addin will be very helpful. Mike Meinz, took a very useful macro and package it as a VS 2012 addin

See: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/528990/A-Visual-Studio-add-in-to-move-Windows-Forms-Desig

For us who each day move lots of code from Vb6 and VB.NET to MVVM. ASP.NET MVC, etc, this kind of tools become very handy.

Use Crystal Reports in VS2010

Crystal Reports was a tool very used by VB6 developers.

Sometimes when you are migrating a VB6 applications, you find a lot of reports created with this tool.

What should you do? Should you rewrite them on another technology?

Well that really depends on project requirements, but Crystal Reports has good support for VS2010, both for 32 and 64 bit environments.

So you don't need to throw away your reports you can still use Crystal Reports.

However that hard thing to do is where to find Crystal Reports for VS. Do you need to buy some software for that?

I have found that you can download Crystal Reports for VS2010 is just that the links are a little hidden. My friend Victor send me the following information which has been very useful for this task:

CommandBarControl Click Event is not Working!!!!

Today I was doing a VS extention as part of my weekend relaxation activities ;)

Everything was great until succendly something was not happening as I expected.

 I was adding a context menu to the code window with a dynamic list of options.

And each option had a different click delegate, but my click events were

disrespectfully discarted.

 Luckily I found this post:  http://www.rauchy.net/blog/?cat=4&paged=2

 And now for a tricky part: since you ge\t your instance of CommandBarEvents inside the scope of a method, when the method ends, the Garbage Collector collects it, leaving all the event handlers orphaned. Unless you keep your instance safe from the jaws of the mighty Garbage Collector, your buttons will not respond to clicks.

To do so, just keep your CommandBarEvents instance(s) as member fields of your class. Once your class is disposed, they will be disposed as well.

 Thanks Rauchy you saved my day! (And my wife is happy because I'm finally getting out of the bathroom :P)

Share Code between Silverlight, Winforms and even Metro: Portable Library Tools

Maybe you faced the situation where you had code that was to be used on your server side services and also on your silverlight clients. 
Having this situation required some tricks because Silverlight Class libraries could not be used on .NET projects and viceversa.
Common workarounds were to share files and use precompilation directive iack!!

Well VS 2011 has a concept called Portable Class Libraries which allow you to create class libraries that can be use in Windows Phone, Silverlight, .NET framework, etc.

And if you have VS 2010 you don't have to suffer. Just use the Portable Library Tools from from the VS Extensions and start sharing code (see this image form the VS Extensions site)

For more details about Portable Libraries check the MSDN documentation page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg597391.aspx

Can I Install Roslyn in Windows XP?

Yes, you can.

The only thing that you will need is to copy the sqmapi.dll file that you can find in either: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - ENU or C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE. as quoted in: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/roslyn/thread/dd38cd0a-eb6e-401c-bec5-28ca2b9b4a5d

Also make sure to have installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 ans VS SDK SP1

Web Standards Update not working after install

If you were looking for HTML5 and CSS3 support, web standards update is a great choice.

However this install tool does not work if you installation is not in the defualt Visual Studio directory:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7

One way to fix it is to run the Web Standard update and after the update look for the default dir:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7

and copy and merge its contents in your current instalation directory

Profiling Silverlight Applications with Visual Studio 2010

The VS Profiler Team has an excellent post teaching how to use the VS2010 profiler with Silverlight Applications.

The steps are simple.

Run the A Visual Studio Command Prompt

And follow these steps:

1. VSPerfClrEnv /sampleon
2. "c:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" C:\Breakout\Breakout\Bin\Release\TestPage.html
3. VSPerfCmd /start:sample /output:MyFile /attach:<PID of iexplore.exe process>
4. Run your scenario
5. VSPerfCmd /detach
6. VSPerfCmd /shutdown
7. VSPerfClrEnv /off

NOTE: information reposted from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/profiler/archive/2010/04/26/vs2010-silverlight-4-profiling.aspx

When the finish you will have a file called MyFile.vsp and just open that with VS2010.

Setting the Default Printer in .NET

The following C# code shows how to use WMI to query printers information, set and get default printer.

public bool SetDefaultPrinter()
{
    System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher search = 
                   default(System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher);
    System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection results = 
                   default(System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection);
    System.Management.ManagementObject printer = 
                   default(System.Management.ManagementObject);


    search = 
     new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher("select * from win32_printer");
    results = search.Get();
    //Get Default Printer
    System.Management.ManagementObject defaultPrinter = null;
    foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject foundPrinter in results)
    {
        System.Management.PropertyDataCollection 
              propertyDataCollection = foundPrinter.Properties;

         if ((bool)foundPrinter["Default"]) // DEFAULT PRINTER
         {
              System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(foundPrinter["Name"]);
              System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(foundPrinter["Location"]);
         }
     }


     //Sets new default Printer
     foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject foundPrinter in results)
     {
         System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print(foundPrinter["Name"].ToString());
         if (foundPrinter["Name"].Equals("PDFCreator"))
         {
             System.Management.ManagementBaseObject outParams = 
                   foundPrinter.InvokeMethod("SetDefaultPrinter", null, null);
             if (outParams == null)
                 System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Unable to set default printer");
             Int32 retVal = (int)(uint)outParams.Properties["ReturnValue"].Value;
             if (retVal == 0)
                return true;
             else
                return false;
         }
     }

    return false;

}

Program database manager mismatch

I was playing around with dumpbin trying to figure out some problems with a 32-bit dll and in order to make
dumpbin run from the command line I just copied the mspdb100.dll file to
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin>

Something simple right! No harm can be gotten from something like that? WRONG!!!

After that some of my C++ project stop compiling with the annoying message: Program database manager mismatch!!.

Luckily I remembered copying that file, so I just gave it a try, and guest what? Everything works fine now.

Well I’m posting it just a reminder that for VS C++ you must put attention on all the details

Interop Structures to UnManaged Dlls

For VB6 applications it is common to rely on OS or Kernel API Calls. Some of those APIs might
need you to send data back and for the native API.

Marshalling in .NET can be complicated and bothersome. I have published several posts about
interop. But it usually depends on adding several marshalling attributes and even tricks specially for
fixed strings.

So I decided to provide a more a simpler approach for conversion. In this approach you just need to things:

1. Your VB6 types or structs will be mapped to .NET classes
2. All VB6 type or struct fields will be mapped to public fields
3. An attribute must be used on those fields to indicate the field length, for arrays or strings.
4. Extension methods .AsString() .SetFromString and .GetClassLength will handle all the complexities of setting the struct fields.

Let’s see an example:

Type EmployeeRecord
    FirstName As String * 5
    LastName As String * 5
End Type

That vb6 type will be mapped in .NET following this approach to:

    public class EmployeeRecord 
    {
        [FixedLength(5)]
        public string FirstName = "Mau";
        [FixedLength(5)]
        public string LastName = "Rojas";

    }

You can then simple use that class in .NET

var emp = new EmployeeRecord {FirstName="Mauricio",LastName="Rojas"} ;
var str = emp.AsString();
//This str value will be "MauriRojas" the helper extension methods
// .AsString and .SetFromString will handle setting the internal class fields

All that is very good but how is this used in Marshalling?? Well very simple. Let’s say you have a Dll called foo.dll
with a function foo that receives an EmployeeRecord:

        [DllImport("foo.dll")]
        public static extern int foo(IntPtr Struct);

Then if you want to call that function you will do something like:

            var emp = new EmployeeRecord { FirstName="Ann",LastName="Smith"};
            string str = emp.AsString();
            var ptr = IntPtr.Zero;
            ptr = Marshal.StringToBSTR(str);
            //or 
            ptr = Marshal.StringToHGlobalAnsi(str);
            //or
            ptr = Marshal.StringToHGlobalAuto(str);
            //or
            ptr = Marshal.StringToHGlobalUni(str);

            //And call the native function
            foo(ptr);

If the function modifies the structure and you want to reflect those changes then you will do something like:

str = Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi(ptr,typeof(EmployeeRecord).GetClassLength())
emp.SetFromString(str);

This solution can also be applied for more complex structures. For example:

    public class EmployeeRecord 
    {
        [FixedLength(5)]
        public string FirstName = "Mau";
        [FixedLength(5)]
        public string LastName = "Rojas";

    }

    public class Record1
    {
        public int field1;
        [FixedLength(10)]
        public string field2 = "";
        public EmployeeRecord rec = new EmployeeRecord();
    }

    public class GeneralInfo
    {
        public int field1;
        [ArrayLength(5)]
        [FixedLength(2)]
        public String[] countrycodes = { "cr","es","mx","pa","ni"};
        [FixedLength(2)]
        public EmployeeRecord[] employees;
    }

If you want to try it out this is the link to the CODE