Xin Yan

One of the new features in Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) is easier custom control development for .NET Compact Framework. This article is about how to use Visual Studio 2005 to create custom control for .NET Compact Framework and provide design-time support. Introduction to Custom Control A Windows Forms custom control is a class that derives directly or indirectly from System.Windows.Forms.Control or System.Windows.Forms. UserControl. Using custom control technology, developers can easily create powerful, reusable and redistributable Windows Forms controls. There are three common custom control scenarios: Combine existing controls to author a composite control. In this case, the custom control should derive from System.Windows.Forms.UserControl. Extend an existing control to add to its functionality. In this case, the custom control should derive from the existing control... (more)

MSBuild - What It Does and What You Can Expect in the Future

In Visual Studio 2003 and earlier, the build process for Visual Basic and C# projects was hard-coded, and built into Visual Studio itself. The only build scripting tool that Microsoft offered was nmake, and a companion tool called build.exe that provided some support for concurrent builds. Visual Studio users whose build systems were based on makefiles had to maintain project files in parallel. For Visual Studio 2005, we thought it would be great if it was possible to completely customize the build process, and to build Visual Studio projects on machines that didn't even have Vis... (more)

.NET Feature — Creating Templates for Visual Studio 2005

Visual Studio project templates and item templates are reusable and customizable stubs that can simplify the development process. They provide pre-defined starting points for the project or the project items, thus removing the need to create new projects and items from scratch every time. A Visual Studio template is represented by an icon, a name and a description in the New Project dialog or the Add New Item dialog. Behind the scene, each template is a compressed .zip file located in a special folder. Managing templates is as easy as managing files. Visual Studio 2005 installs a... (more)