How can I migrate property pages? Well that is a common question when migrating VB6 Activex controls.
Property Pages where commonly used in VB6 to provide a mechanism for your user controls to edit values.
.NET provides even more mechanisms for editing your control properties. You can provide an editor for each one of your component properties or you can provide a ComponentEditor for all the component, this is very similar to the VB6 concept.
In .NET the ComponentEditor can be actived in the designer selecting Properties from the context menu when you right click over the control.
This is from the MSDN documentation:
“A component editor is used to edit a component as a whole and can be used to implement a
user interface similar to that of the property pages. You associate a component editor with a
component by using the EditorAttribute attribute.” From: ComponentEditor Class
The VBUC does not process out of the box, your PropertyPages, but I developed a tool that can be
used so the VBUC can help you migrate those property pages. This tool will modify your VB6 project,
and VB6 PropertyPages source code to make those VB6 PropertyPages look like VB6 UserControls.
This will allow the VBUC migration tool to recover some of the VB6 PropertyPages code and appearance
and with some manual changes you can get your property pages to work again.
Use the following link to downlaod the tool: DOWNLOAD TOOL
So these are the steps to migrate a VB6 Project that has Property Pages with the VB6.
1) Make a backup copy of your source code.
2) Run the TOOL with your project file. For example if your project file is Project1.vbp then run the tool like this:
FixPropertyPages Project1.vbp
This will generate a new VB6 Project file called ModifiedProject1.vbp
3) Open the VBUC, and migrate the new project file ModifiedProject1.vbp
4) Open the migrated solution in Visual Studio.
5) All your property pages will be migrated to .NET UserControls. You might need to go thru some changes to make them completely functional. Remeber to add the [ToolboxItem(false)] to these property pages because they do not need to be visible in your toolbox.
6) Now, to associate those property pages with your UserControl do this:
6.1) Add a new code file to your migrated solution. We are going to create a ComponentEditor, that will hold all the pages and associate that to the migrated control. Lets say the control is named Control1 and the property pages are PropertyPage1 and PropertyPage2.
We will call the ComponentEditor ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl.
In this ComponentEditor we will add an internal class for each PropertyPage. This class will inherit from ComponentEditorPage. We will call this internal classes Page1, and Page2. And we will associate those classes with the ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl in the GetComponentEditorPages().
The resulting code will be like:
C#using System.Windows.Forms.Design;
using WindowsFormsApplication1;
using System.Drawing;
using System.ComponentModel;
[ToolboxItem(false)]
public class ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl : WindowsFormsComponentEditor
{
// Methods
public override bool EditComponent(ITypeDescriptorContext context, object component)
{
return false;
}
class Page1 : ComponentEditorPage
{
// Methods
public Page1()
{
PropertyPage1ForControl1 page1 = new PropertyPage1ForControl1();
Size mysize = new Size(400, 250);
this.Size = mysize;
this.Text = "Page 1 for Control1";
this.Controls.Add(page1);
}
protected override void LoadComponent() { }
protected override void SaveComponent() { }
}
class Page2 : ComponentEditorPage
{
// Methods
public Page2()
{
PropertyPage2ForControl1 page2 = new PropertyPage2ForControl1();
Size mysize = new Size(400, 250);
this.Size = mysize;
this.Text = "Page 2 for Control1";
this.Controls.Add(page2);
}
protected override void LoadComponent() { }
protected override void SaveComponent() { }
}
protected override System.Type[] GetComponentEditorPages()
{
return new System.Type[] { typeof(Page1),typeof(Page2) };
}
protected override int GetInitialComponentEditorPageIndex()
{
return 0;
}
}
VB.NET
<ToolboxItem(False)> _
Public Class ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl
Inherits WindowsFormsComponentEditor
' Methods
Public Overrides Function EditComponent(ByVal context As ITypeDescriptorContext, ByVal component As Object) As Boolean
Return False
End Function
Protected Overrides Function GetComponentEditorPages() As Type()
Return New Type() { GetType(Page1), GetType(Page2) }
End Function
Protected Overrides Function GetInitialComponentEditorPageIndex() As Integer
Return 0
End Function
' Nested Types
Private Class Page1
Inherits ComponentEditorPage
' Methods
Public Sub New()
Dim page1 As New PropertyPage1ForControl1
Dim mysize As New Size(400, 250)
MyBase.Size = mysize
Me.Text = "Page 1 for Control1"
MyBase.Controls.Add(page1)
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub LoadComponent()
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub SaveComponent()
End Sub
End Class
Private Class Page2
Inherits ComponentEditorPage
' Methods
Public Sub New()
Dim page2 As New PropertyPage2ForControl1
Dim mysize As New Size(400, 250)
MyBase.Size = mysize
Me.Text = "Page 2 for Control1"
MyBase.Controls.Add(page2)
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub LoadComponent()
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub SaveComponent()
End Sub
End Class
End Class
7) After creating the ComponentEditor you must associate the component Editor to your new component editors. This can be done with something like:
C#
[Editor(typeof(ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl), typeof(ComponentEditor))]
public class Control1 : UserControl
|
VB.NET
<Editor(GetType(ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl), GetType(ComponentEditor))> _
Public Class Control1
|
8) Now to use this property pages, go to the designer screen and open the context menu and select properties. And editor with your properties pages will appear :)
9) You still need to write some code for saving the property values that is something you have to add to the LoadComponent and SaveComponent methods of the internal classes in your ComponentEditor (ComponentEditorToAssociatePagesForMyControl in our previous example).
I hope this helps to get your code faster in .NET. I'm attaching a C# sample if you want to try it out.
Some time ago Jose Aguilar had blogged about the Interesting Behavior of TabIndex in Migrated Applications. As he explained at the time there are functional differences between the TabIndex behaviour in VB6
If you look at Figure1.
Figure 1. This image show a VB6 form, the TabIndex values and the way the form navigates when you press Tab.
If you migrate that form with the VBUC and activate the TabOrder option in View\TabOrder you will see something like:
As you can see by the 0.1 and 0.3 and 5.4 and 5.2 values. TabOrder in .NET is hierarquical. When you press tab you will navigate to the next control in the container, and when you get to the last in that container then you will switch to the next one in the following container. This is different from the VB6 world when you would have switched from 0.1 to 5.2.
How can we fix this without a lot of manual corrections. Well you can override the ProcessTabKey method to navigate controls following the tabIndex without taking into account the containers.
The code you will need to add is:
/// <summary>
/// holds a list of controls for tab navigation
/// </summary>
List<Control> controls = new List<Control>();
/// <summary>
/// Populates the list used for tab navigation
/// </summary>
/// <param name="c">Control to use to populate list</param>
protected void BuildOrder(Control c)
{
if (c.TabStop)
controls.Add(c);
if (c.Controls.Count > 0)
{
foreach (Control child in c.Controls)
BuildOrder(child);
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Transversers all form controls to populate a list ordered by TabIndex
/// that will be used to follow tabindex ignoring containers
/// </summary>
protected void BuildOrder()
{
if (controls.Count == 0)
{
foreach (Control c in this.Controls)
{
BuildOrder(c);
}
controls.Sort(
delegate(Control c1, Control c2) { return c1.TabIndex.CompareTo(c2.TabIndex); });
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Overrides default tabIndex behaviour
/// </summary>
/// <param name="forward"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
protected override bool ProcessTabKey(bool forward)
{
BuildOrder();
if (ActiveControl != null)
{
int index = controls.IndexOf(ActiveControl);
if (index != -1)
{
if (forward)
controls[(index + 1) % controls.Count].Select();
else
controls[index==0?controls.Count-1:index-1].Select();
return true;
}
else
return false;
}
else
return base.ProcessTabKey(forward);
}
After adding this code just run your project and it will fix the tabIndex issues.
Recently I discovered in MSDN a great addition, a must to for all C# developers. CodeRush Express.
This product was build by DevExpress and it just make it perfect your experience with Visual Studio.
For example finding symbols or files, tabbing between references, and more than 20 differente refactorings!!!!
Take at look at this new extension! It’s a absolutely a must.
Well recently Kingsley has point me to a lot of useful links to improve the ExtendedWebBrowser. However he found another detail. When in Javascript you do something like a:
window.open(‘url’,’window’,’width=200;height=300’);
Those width and height settings were not being considered in the new window. I researched for I while until I found this great link:
So basicly I follow the sugested code and added logic in my EventSink class:
public void WindowSetLeft(int Left)
{
///Should I calculate any diff?
_Browser.Parent.Left = Left;
}
public void WindowSetTop(int Top)
{
_Browser.Parent.Top = Top;
}
public void WindowSetWidth(int Width)
{
int diff = 0;
diff = _Browser.Parent.Width - _Browser.Width;
_Browser.Parent.Width = diff + Width;
}
public void WindowSetHeight(int Height)
{
int diff = 0;
diff = _Browser.Parent.Height - _Browser.Height;
_Browser.Parent.Height = diff + Height;
}So now when the window opens it takes the specified width, heigth, left and top.
As always
HERE IS THE UPDATED CODE
I had previously posted an extended version of the WebBrowser Control. This code posted in Opening Popup in a NewWindow and NewWindow2 Events in the C# WebBrowserControl, dealt with some issues when you want to have a form with a WebBrowser and in the enclosed page you have a Javascript code like:
window.open(“ <some url to a page”)
But recently another problem arised. What if you have a Javascript snippet like:
window.close()
OMG!!! Why haven’t I thought about it. Well Kelder wrote me about this problem and he also sent me some of his\her research results:
Solution (Add WebBrowser as unmanaged code): blogs.msdn.com/jpsanders/archive/2008/04/23/window-close-freezes-net-2-0-webbrowser-control-in-windows-form-application.aspx
Solution (Add WebBrowser using WM_NOTIFYPARENT override):blogs.msdn.com/jpsanders/archive/2007/05/25/how-to-close-the-form-hosting-the-webbrowser-control-when-scripting-calls-window-close-in-the-net-framework-version-2-0.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jpsanders/archive/2007/05/25/how-to-close-the-form-hosting-the-webbrowser-control-when-scripting-calls-window-close-in-the-net-framework-version-2-0.aspx
Solution (Implementation not detailed): social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winforms/thread/1199c004-9eb2-400d-a118-6e06bca9f1f0/
Proposes changing pop-up links to WebBrowser navigate: dotnetninja.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/prevent-opening-new-window-from-webbrowser-control/Close
problem observed (no solution):www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/ExtendedWebBrowser.aspx
It seams to me that the better solution is to use jpsanders solution, so I created an ExtendWebBrowser_v2 (the following is the modified fragment):
//Extend the WebBrowser control
public class ExtendedWebBrowser : WebBrowser
{
// Define constants from winuser.h
private const int WM_PARENTNOTIFY = 0x210;
private const int WM_DESTROY = 2;
AxHost.ConnectionPointCookie cookie;
WebBrowserExtendedEvents events;
protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)
{
switch (m.Msg)
{
case WM_PARENTNOTIFY:
if (!DesignMode)
{
if (m.WParam.ToInt32() == WM_DESTROY)
{
Message newMsg = new Message();
newMsg.Msg = WM_DESTROY;
// Tell whoever cares we are closing
Form parent = this.Parent as Form;
if (parent!=null)
parent.Close();
}
}
DefWndProc(ref m);
break;
default:
base.WndProc(ref m);
break;
}
}
The problem that might arise with this solution is that the parent might not be a Form but an user control, etc. For a more general aproach I think I should send a WM_DESTROY directly to the parent, but for most cases it works. I’m attaching the code and a sample page called test0.htm. I hope this helps and rembember you can always donate to programming geeks jejejejeje just kidding
HERE IS THE CODE
If you have created any schedule jobs or you just need to see what jobs are available in a server you use the dba_jobs table.
The following links provides more details about this view: http://www.praetoriate.com/data_dictionary/dd_dba_jobs.htm
In a previous post, i had published an “Extended Version” of the WebBrowser control
that gave you access to events like the NewWindow2.
This event that is not public in the common WebBrowser control allows you to intercept
the NewWindow event but gives you the posibility to setup the the ppDisp property witch sets
a pointer to the WebBrowser where the new window will be open.
So i setup a small example using this “ExtendedBrowser”.
I created a simple page (well really it was my wife, I know about transport-layer, C++, bits etc, but I never remember HTML syntax):
<html>
<body>
<H1> This is sample page to test opening a pop up in a new form </H1>
<input type="button" onclick="window.open('test0.htm')"/>
</body>
</html>
And created a simple form like in the following picture:
Instead of using a WebBrowser control i just used an ExtendedWebBrowser from my previous post.
And added code like:
private void extendedWebBrowser1_NewWindow2(object sender, NewWindow2EventArgs e)
{
//Intercepting this event will allow us to create a new form in which
//we will open the new webpage, to do that we must set the ppDisp property
//of the NewWindow2EventArgs
FormWithExtendedBrowser form1 = new FormWithExtendedBrowser();
form1.Show();
e.PPDisp = form1.extendedWebBrowser1.Application;
}
When I run the code , it now opens the pop up in my form:
But test if for yourself! :) HERE IS THE CODE
In VB6 you can have code like:
Private Sub Command1_Click()
Dim x As StdPicture
Set x = LoadPicture("C:\setup.ico")
Me.MouseIcon = LoadPicture("C:\setup.ico")
Me.MousePointer = ccCustom
End Sub
How can you migrate that to .NET??????
Well maybe with a helper like the following can help:
using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using VB6 = Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.VB6.Support;
namespace Project2
{
internal partial class Form1
: System.Windows.Forms.Form
{
private void Command1_Click( Object eventSender, EventArgs eventArgs)
{
System.Drawing.Image x;
x = System.Drawing.Image.FromFile("C:\\setup.ico");
this.Cursor = CursorHelper.CreateCursor(x);
}
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
Application.Run(new Form1());
}
}
public class CursorHelper
{
private struct IconInfo
{
public bool fIcon;
public int xHotspot;
public int yHotspot;
public IntPtr hbmMask;
public IntPtr hbmColor;
}
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern IntPtr CreateIconIndirect(ref IconInfo icon);
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
[return: System.Runtime.InteropServices.MarshalAs(System.Runtime.InteropServices.UnmanagedType.Bool)]
static extern bool GetIconInfo(IntPtr hIcon, ref IconInfo pIconInfo);
private static Cursor CreateCursor(System.Drawing.Bitmap bmp, int xHotSpot, int yHotSpot)
{
IconInfo tmp = new IconInfo();
GetIconInfo(bmp.GetHicon(), ref tmp);
tmp.xHotspot = xHotSpot;
tmp.yHotspot = yHotSpot;
tmp.fIcon = false;
return new Cursor(CreateIconIndirect(ref tmp));
}
public static Cursor CreateCursor(object picture)
{
if (picture is System.Drawing.Bitmap)
return CreateCursor(picture as System.Drawing.Bitmap, 3, 3);
else
{
System.Drawing.Image image = null;
IntPtr iunknown = System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.GetIUnknownForObject(picture);
if (iunknown == IntPtr.Zero)
{
throw new Exception("Unsupported format");
}
else
{
Guid guidIPicture = new Guid("7BF80980-BF32-101A-8BBB-00AA00300CAB");
Guid guidIPictureDisp = new Guid("7BF80981-BF32-101A-8BBB-00AA00300CAB");
IntPtr testIntPtr = IntPtr.Zero;
if (System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.QueryInterface(iunknown,ref guidIPicture,out testIntPtr)==0)
{
image = Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.VB6.Support.IPictureToImage(picture);
}
else if (System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.QueryInterface(iunknown,ref guidIPictureDisp,out testIntPtr)==0)
{
image = Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.VB6.Support.IPictureDispToImage(picture);
}
if (image == null)
{
throw new Exception("Unsupported format");
}
using (System.Drawing.Bitmap bitmap = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(image))
{
return CreateCursor(bitmap, 3, 3);
}
};
}
}
}
}
Here is some examples of how to determine the WeekNumber of a given Date
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
object index = DateTime.Now;
int res = 0;
//0 First day of year
res = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(
Convert.ToDateTime(index), System.Globalization.CalendarWeekRule.FirstDay, System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo.FirstDayOfWeek);
//1 (Default) First four day week from Sunday
res = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(
Convert.ToDateTime(index), System.Globalization.CalendarWeekRule.FirstFourDayWeek, DayOfWeek.Sunday);
//2 First four day week from StartOfWeek
res = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(
Convert.ToDateTime(index), System.Globalization.CalendarWeekRule.FirstFourDayWeek, System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo.FirstDayOfWeek);
//3 First full week from Sunday
res = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(
Convert.ToDateTime(index), System.Globalization.CalendarWeekRule.FirstFullWeek, DayOfWeek.Sunday);
//4 First full week from StartOfWeek
res = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(
Convert.ToDateTime(index), System.Globalization.CalendarWeekRule.FirstFullWeek, System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo.FirstDayOfWeek);
}
}
}
I was looking into ways to migrate something like the AddressOf operator in VB6. I read in some forums that I could use a delegate, but I hadn’t seen a code sample, so I started googling until I found this great post.
It provided a great example of how to pass a pointer to a function. I am attaching here the code so you can benefit from this too.
Remember to put the Working directory pointing to the output directory of the C DLL. In my case it is
The idea in general is like this:
/// <summary>
/// Simple callback function.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="a">Some integer parameter.</param>
public delegate void CBFUNC(int a);
/// <summary>
/// Demo of a simple callback.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="f">Function to call back to</param>
/// <param name="a">Parameter which will be returned through the callback</param>
[DllImport("c_test_lib.dll")]
public static extern void DoCallback(CBFUNC f, int a);
DOWNLOAD CODE