Navigating with the Back button in Visual Studio

I have often wanted a Back button in Visual Studio, like there is in every browser. For instance if you right click some object and select “Go To Definition” then it would be nice to be able to jump back to where you where before without setting a bookmark or similar.

Turns out there actually are a back button, it’s just not accessible from the Edit menu, you just have to get the correct toolbar visible. To get it:

• Right click on the toolbar (any button) and select “HTML source editing“
• The back button is the first button (looks like a document and a small blue arrow (Forward is here too)

To save monitor space, the “HTML source editing” can replace the “Text Editor” toolbar if you use keyboard shortcuts for bookmarks and intellisense.

The only minus is that apparently there are no keyboard shortcut for either Back or Forward button.

Update: There are shortcuts … CTRL+- for Back (I couldn’t get forward to work) or use navigation buttons on the mouse.

 

Autodesk Inventor Add-In Project Templates in Visual Studio 2008

Autodesk Inventor 2009 lacks support for Visual Studio 2008 in that it will not install a template for it. But luckily the VS2005 templates works fine in 2008 so you can just install them manually. Here is how:

• Make sure you have installed the Inventor SDK:  %program files%/autodesk/inventor/sdk/DeveloperTools.msi
• Install the templates: %program files%/autodesk/inventor/sdk/Developer Tools/Tools/Wizards/InventorWizards.msi
• The templates are normally installed to%program files%/Autodesk/Inventor Wizards/ :
• Now just copy VCSInventorAddInTemplate.zip from the VS8.0_USRPRJTEMPL folder to your template folder :%my documents%/Visual Studio 2008/Templates/ProjectTemplates/Visual C#/
• For VB.NET copy VBInventorAddInTemplate.zip to the VB folder under ProjectTemplates
• If you’re using Visual Studio 2008 Express, then you should copy the .Zips in the VCSEXP8.0_USERPRJTEMPL or VBEXP8.0_USRPRJTEMPL in stead (although the full templates will work)

No start Visual Studio and select new project, under My Templates you should now have a “Autodesk Inventor AddIn” template.

Updates?

Hi,

Sorry for no updates… I haven’t really been working with Windows Mobile development for a long time now, so there hasn’t been much to write. However I’ve learned a lot about Web/AJAX and old fashioned Windows Forms programming lately, but that seems to be against the name of this blog

Thanks for the nice comments though, it’s nice to see my ramblings can be of use to somebody else. Being linked to on Microsoft Small Business Developer Center certainly was a nice suprise  :)

-cheers

Windows Mobile 6 SDK gives Empty Toolbox in Visual Studio

I finally got around to installing the SDK for WM6. Turned out that my Toolbox (in Visual Studio) was completely empty when I started a new WM6 project afterwards.

The solution was to right-click the toolbox and select “Reset Toolbox” from the context menu. This was highly annoying because it of course removed my custom tools (e.g. the Ajax Toolkit). Anyway, at least it’s working.

File upload with ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel

I’ve been working with the Microsoft AJAX toolkit recently (and not so much Windows Mobile – hence lack of update . It’s an amazing framework for people who don’t know much JavaScript but still would like to do some AJAX style web programming (like me). However since it involves a combination of .NET server side programming, HTML and client side JavaScript figuring out what’s wrong when something doesn’t work can be tricky. I’ll try to post a few tricks I found (mostly on ajax.asp.net  :) even though it’s not directly related to mobile programming.

The ASP.NET FileUpload control doesn’t work within an AJAX UpdatePanel by default (when the upload button you create is inside the same panel). This is because a file cannot be uploaded asynchronously. To be able to upload a file the easiest solution is to make a complete postback when the user uploads a file. To do this add a PostBackTrigger on the button:

<asp:UpdatePanel>
  <ContentTemplate>
<asp:Button ID="ButtonUploadFile"
    runat="server" Text="Upload" />
</ContentTemplate>
  <Triggers>
<asp:PostBackTrigger ControlID="ButtonUploadFile" />
  </Triggers>
</asp:UpdatePanel>

(note that it is not an AsyncPostBackTrigger)

Setting MP3s as ringtone

Finally I got around to changing the ringtone on my Windows Mobile device. A quick search on how to use a MP3 as ringtone only turned up ads for applications that would do that for you. As I suspected you don’t need any special software for this – it’s actually embarrassingly easy:

Use the file explorer and navigate to the file you want to use. Tap and hold on it to the context menu appears and select “Set as Ringtone” :-)

Note: This will copy the file to the Windows\Rings folder (i.e. using internal RAM). This is a good idea because there is a gotcha:
 the storage card will usually power down, meaning that if you put it on the card it may take quite a while before the ringtone is heard when someone calls you!

Dump SQL Server database to INSERT statement script

For a long time I’ve wanted a tool to produce ‘MySQL-type’ scripts (backup) for SQL Server – i.e. a text file with all data written as INSERT INTO statements.

I don’t really like the backup function in Enterprise Manager/SQL Studio because it stores all data as a large binary file, and it seems like overkill sometimes. With a text file of INSERT statements I feel more in control, and as a bonus you don’t need special privileges for the DB login (except for being able to read the data/meta-data).

Here is a tool that can do this – released by Microsoft  (on CodePlex)

SQL Server Hosting Toolkit / Database Publishing Wizard

The tool is really meant for generating a script for use with Hosted Servers – but I primarily use it for backups. It is also integrated with Visual Studio.

Windows Mobile 6

As you probably know Windows Mobile 6 has been announced, along with a new SDK. The SDK doesn’t seem to be available yet, but according to the What’s New for Developers Guide, you can use the new emulator with WM 5.0 development.

WM6 is also fully backwards-compatible (it uses Compact Framework 2.0 SP1) so any WM5 app that doesn’t use a lot of esoteric code will run just fine as it is on WM6.

edit: Turns out they dropped the .0 from the version, so while it is Windows Mobile 5.0, the new version is just Windows Mobile 6…

Installing SQL Server Compact Edition Tools for Visual Studio

Looks like there is some sort of bug with the install program for the Visual Studio Tools.  The error message says that some required component is missing, or that there is an version conflict. There is a fix for this posted at the MSDN Forums by Ginny Caughey, I’ll repeat it here:

Install sqlmobile30devtoolsenu.msi from the Visual Studio install media, located in the folder: \vs\wcu\SQLCE first. Then the CE tools will install.

I had this problem, and it was probably because I uninstalled the SQL Server Mobile Edition tools first. This seems to be a bug from Microsoft in that it requires the previous version of the database or that the uninstaller simply uninstalls too much.

The reason I uninstalled the Mobile Editon tools was because it showed up in the datasource list in Visual Studio. After installing the .msi file above, and installing the CE Tools – everything looks right in Visual Studio finally. 

SQL Server Compact Edition

Be sure to download SQL Server Compact Edition quick, before it changes its name again…

(ps. I recomend downloading both the run-time and the SDK from the download page. The SDK doesn’t put the DLLs in the default directory of C:\%Program Files%\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.1\ referenced in the docs)

Update: SQL Server Express Studio doesn’t currently support SSCE – but it will with Service Pack 2. You can get the CTP of it here.