Hi Guys if your have ever installed/used Infragistics Winform control products you will be aware they ship with two utilities.
One utility when run adds all their controls to the Visusl Studio toolbar.
The second utility updates existing VB.Net or VC to use the latest controls.

Utilities like this would be very useful when installing new versions of Flowchart.Net

Doug

Hi Doug,

We have toolbox installation in our Windows Forms pack, but we haven't added it to the individual controls' installers. Is the Infragistics tool an external application that you can run outside the installer?

Stoyan

Stoyan

Great to hear from you.

The add controls to the Visual Studio toolbar is an external utility that you run after installation.

The upgrade utility for an existing VB.net project is an external utility and it can also be an addin to the VS IDE. When you open an existing project you can use the utility via the IDE Tools menu to upgrade the project to use the Infragistics controls. If you have multiple versions installed you can select the controls that you wish to upgrade the project to use.

I hope that helps you.

Doug

It turned out we already have an internal upgrade utility; we use it to update the sample projects before releasing new versions. We'll see if we can make it more user-friendly and include it in the package for the next release. I could upload it here if you wish to try it out.

Stoyan

Stoyan

Always more than happy to assist you guys. I have a few test programs that were based on using earlier versions of FlowChart.Net that I can test your upgrade utility on.

Regards
Doug

Hi Doug,

You can get it here:
http://mindfusion.eu/_samples/ReferenceUpdater.zip

It has an option to check-out projects from SourceSafe before updating and references some COM interop assembly for that; we are not sure what happens if you don't have SourceSafe installed.

The tool only updates the project reference properties - the same ones you can see in the VS property window when you select a reference. It can update any reference, not only Mindfusion's ones. For this we have some project files which you can open from File/Open, which describe the assembly properties to be set in the VS project. You can find one such file in the zip archive which we use to update the flowchart.net samples.

To try out how the application works, start ReferenceUpdater.exe and open the Diagramming.rup file. The VS projects that will be updated are specified in the Directory text box. You will need to enter your local directory containing the target VS projects in this text box. Click the enumerate button to list all VS projects in the specified directory in the projects list. You will need to manually modify the update rules below to update the assemblies of interest. Between the % character enter the full path to the assembly on your system. The tool uses it to read the version number in case you select the "Use specific version" property. You might also have to modify the HintPath of each reference. Once this is done, select Update -> Go to update all the projects in the specified directory.

We have never run this on anything different than our sample projects, so it's probably a good idea to backup your projects before running the tool

Stoyan

Stoyan

Thanks for that; I will test it over the next few days and provide honest feedback. I only have SourceSafe on my Clients system (which I will not run the test on) I do not have SourceSafe on my dev environment so this will be a good test. I think I have a copy of sourceSafe in the cupboard somewhere and it load it up should the utility fail without it being present.

Doug

Hi Doug,

We have also created a toolbox installation utility:
http://mindfusion.eu/_beta/toolboxinst.zip

If you'd like to try it out - use the tree on the left to locate a folder that contains any WinForms assemblies, select the ones you want installed, select the Visual Studio version from the radio buttons and enter toolbox tab name. If you copy the included xml file to the flowchart.net assemblies folder and open the folder with the tool, it will read some predefined values from it.

Stoyan