September 2008 - Posts

• Windows.Forms Designer Project Resource Support

  As of SharpDevelop 3.0 build 3534, the integrated Windows.Forms designer supports project resources for images and icons. Especially, this means that forms generated by Visual Studio that use such resources can now be loaded and modified in SharpDevelop. In earlier versions of SharpDevelop, when adding an image or icon to a control the only possibility was to import an image file which was then stored in the resource file of the form. This also meant that an image was often stored in the resources multiple times, for every single control where it was used. In the new build, you will now see the following dialog when you click on the dots to edit an image property of a control: The "local resource" option in combination with the "Import" button lets you do what the earlier versions did: Import a file and store it in the resources of the form. The new "project resource" option, however, lets you choose a suitable image resource from any resource file in the current project that does not already belong to a form. This way, resources can be reused and maintained more efficiently. Adding this feature required a lot of complex coding, including creating custom code serializers and deserializers, and getting this right is sometimes more like a game of pure chance, because the internals of the forms designer in the .NET framework are documented poorly. So, please feel free to test this feature thoroughly and report any problems in the forums. Posted Sep 10 2008, 08:55 PM by Christian Hornung with no comments Filed under: Forms designer

• More Comprehensive Exception Reports for SharpDevelop

  First and foremost, we hope that you will not see the "unhandled exception" dialog box of SharpDevelop often. Nevertheless I would like to shed light on some improvements in that area. In spite of all error reporting features of an application, the best thing users can do to help us is to describe as precisely as possible what they were doing that eventually led to the error. However, SharpDevelop 3 now also outputs some additional information that may help with fixing the bugs. As of build 3.0.0.3455, two extensions to the exception reports created by SharpDevelop are in place and working: The log message recorder permanently stores a number of internal log messages (currently up to 25) in a cyclic buffer. Those messages are then added to the report whenever an unhandled exception occurs. Here you can see the exception box with some log messages scrolled into view: Additionally, some state information is added to the report. Currently the following items are listed: installed 3rd party add-ins type and name of the current project name and some properties of the current solution active view content Please note that the new exception reports can contain information which you might want to keep private. For example, names of projects, files, classes, methods etc. can appear in the log messages and state information, perhaps even parts of code that has been edited. If you are concerned about privacy, you should look through the generated report and check whether it contains anything you do not want to disclose before posting it. Feel free to anonymize it as necessary, but please make sure that you do not change the "meaning" of the report - i.e. if you change a name, change all occurrences of that name equally. Posted Sep 02 2008, 09:20 PM by Christian Hornung with no comments Filed under: Exception reporting