Solved: Visual Studio Toolbox Blues

[MilesAhead]

I can never remember how to get Visual Studio to show the Toolbox, Form Design, Solution Explorer and Properties windows at the same time.  No autohiding or Toolbox overlapping the Form Design view.  I just installed VS 2013 and I'm in that "about to waste 4 hours doing this for the tenth time" twilight zone.  Anyone know the trick?  It's some little setting I can never find.  Man it drives me nuts.

It's the type of thing that makes me want to stay with C# standard v. 1.06 except it wouldn't emit any useful code.  

Edit:  I got it.  I figured out how to use that window position template thing when you drag a window with the mouse.  I think venting helped though.    I just hope everything hangs together.

[Stoic Joker]

I was thinking about giving it a shot, but the MPN subscription requirement just didn't sit right with me. Is there really anything that exciting in 13 to make it worth shenanigans?

I'm currently running 10 (08 & 05), and I can score a copy of 12 from the office ... It's just that this subscription shit gives me the willies..

[mwb1100]

this subscription shit gives me the willies

-Stoic Joker (April 10, 2015, 11:20 PM)

You don't have to deal with subscriptions for Visual Studio Pro - you can get that SKU for $300 (upgrade) or $500 (full, non-upgrade):

  - http://www.microsoft.../productID.284832200

Also, the Community edition is essentially the Pro SKU - it's free for many uses. The main exception is that no more than 5 people in an organization can use Community edition (and if your organization is 'enterprise' sized, then Community can only be used for open source, academic or classrooms purposes): https://www.visualst...io-community-vs.aspx

For SKUs higher than Pro (Premium, Ultimate, etc), then you do need an MSDN subscription.  But if it makes you feel any better, you could consider it a purchase of Visual Studio that comes with a 1 year access to the MSDN downloads - the license allows you to continue using whatever software you downloaded from MSDN after the subscription expires.  You aren't required to renew unless you want continued access to the downloads and to any new download offerings.

[Ath]

Is there really anything that exciting in 13 to make it worth shenanigans?

-Stoic Joker (April 10, 2015, 11:20 PM)

Well, it seems that the WPF/xaml designer is finally working, without the major hickups and bugs experienced in all previous versions...

[MilesAhead]

I haven't had much chance to look around.  I got an old project that does a tiny Ini Editor, that I originally did on VS8 in C#, to build and run on it so far.  Just judging from the install it seems to have both 32 and 64 bit compilers.  Hopefully I can do 64 bit C++ stuff without kludging on the SDK as I did in the past.

My first goal is to redo my MD5Hash program in C#.  I did it as a dialog Win32 msg loop type program in C++ but I lost the source code.  In any case I learned that the time consumption was the disk i/o rather than the MD5Sum calculations.  If I can optimize the disk reads of large files I'll try the built in hash algorithms in C#(I assume it has them in the framework) and see how it compares to the C++ implementation.

I haven't even looked through the Toolbox yet to see what's neat.  This Laptop seems to have a complex about doing updates.  It must have sat on the updates required for install for 45 minutes.  Even using a Restore Point hangs on this thing.  It's the only Laptop I ever used so I can't say if that is strange but I have a feeling it's uncommon.  

[MilesAhead]

I'm a bit surprised.  AFAICT there's no built in ProgressBar control that does Taskbar Button progress.  The stuff in the Toolbox looks pretty much like the stuff from VS2010 Express.  Part of this may be due to the fact I excluded DB stuff and am not interested in Phone development yet.  But Desktop stuff looks like same old same old. ( I have VS2013 Pro.  Initially I went with most of the recommended install but since it just hung there staring at me for an hour I chopped it down to bare minimum c++ and C# stuff.  Even with that I had to do a repair install the next day.)

For anything snazzy I'm still looking through user written controls in CodeProject.

The VC++ I pretty much just selected MFC and Win32 stuff.  I don't see myself doing VC++ managed form programs.  I haven't done a c++ program yet but supposedly there are 64 bit and cross compilers installed.

I remember why I decided to do most stuff in AutoIt3 and AHK because especially on the Laptop it is so sluggish.  Also one time I opened a solution file just by using Open File instead of Open Solution and the whole IDE crashed(nothing else was open,  I did a Close Solution first.)

The other thing that strikes me is why does everything look like it is running on a phone with a shades of gray only screen?  Just because it does multiple device dev the environment itself has to be drab?  I don't get it.

I still haven't stuck my toe into F# or WPF yet.  But you can't go by my experience.  I tend to do a program or two to keep my hand in.  Then go back to scripting out of an editor as it's just so much faster.

Right now I'm trying to find a free ProgressBar that does animation to make something with a humorous progressbar instead of just the plane jane green thermometer.

I had to do a Repair Install just to get the VC++ stuff to show up.  I may have to turn off fast boot on this Laptop since restore points and updates sure don't run smoothly.  The repair install basically went through the whole shooting match that should have been completed yesterday.  On the plus side I wasn'r back to square one "Toolbox hides the main form" mode.  It remembered my layout and Help Viewer settings at least.

I'll know more once I have some new programs running.  I have to slog it like a Volga Boatman since I forget a lot of this stuff.  Maybe by the end of May I'll have something small to post.  

[MilesAhead]

One thing I did try:  My IniEdit program uses a Glass form with a Searchable RichEdit coded by a programmer on CodeProject.  Visual Studio Buttons can sit on Glass without distortion.  But it seems like the button is still the only control adapted to Glass.  I tried a standard Main Menu and everything on the menu strip turned white.. which is typical of controls that look distorted on Glass.  Seems the Glass thing has been totally neglected since VS2010.

[wraith808]

There is a built in progress bar, unless I'm not understanding you.  I don't think most people use the toolbox with the advent of xaml and wpf.  Just type in the tags for the control in question in the editor.  I've not used the toolbox in a long time.

[MilesAhead]

There is a built in progress bar, unless I'm not understanding you.  I don't think most people use the toolbox with the advent of xaml and wpf.  Just type in the tags for the control in question in the editor.  I've not used the toolbox in a long time.

-wraith808 (April 14, 2015, 09:56 AM)

I remember WPF coming in now.  I didn't like the look of it as it was markup.  I get the theory of separating appearance from action.  If I can grok Blend maybe I'll try to get it to do something.  All in good time. 

[MilesAhead]

Edit:  This Laptop has always been funky when it comes to Restore Points.  It seems to be exacerbated by vstudio 2013 install.  But my online searches seem to come up with nothing very positive for fix except reinstall.

I ran sfc  /scannow and all it found was some Explorer Frame stuff.  Which I suspect was left over from a File Explorer modification utility.

It's frustrating because I watched an MS online vid how to use Blend.  Looks like there's quite a bit of engineering sunk into it.  But this Laptop may not be the best platform to try it out.

In any case I have the disc image and license.  I can always put it on when I get a desktop.  Or maybe I'll get lucky and this machine will stabilize.  The one thing I did learn was disabling Fast Start on the Laptop seemed to cut the hang time when running Restore Points from 20 min => fovever  to about 5 minutes.

I did see some google hits about vstudio causing ComSysApp failures but they were nearly all XP and IIS related.  Oh well.  That's one frustration of large IDEs.  You may spend 2 days to get them on only to find you can't really use them to the full measure.