如何以编程方式创建VS 2008 Windows Forms项目，该项目可以像手动创建的任何其他项目一样进行维护

Question

I have a bunch of control properties (type of control, location, size, etc.) derived as a text file from an old system on a different platform. I thought it would be fairly easy to load these "control descriptions" into a Windows Forms project in VS 2008 and then be able to maintain the new project in VS just as if it had been created manually.

I'm familiar with using VS and C# but it I'm not sure where to start with this.

I searched the web and found a number of articles about creating controls on forms at run time and that is not so hard, given the information I have, but I want the created form to be a permanent part of a Win Forms project, so I need to get what was created at run time into VS, and accessible in the project just as if it had been manually dropped on the designer surface. Is there a way I could create these forms with a program and then "save" them in a form acceptable to VS?

I manually created a windows Form project to try and use as a "template" and identify how VS does it. I have tried to understand the contents and the relationships between the various resource files, but it is a bit too much. There are also warnings that various files are created by VS and should not be amended manually.

I have almost 1000 forms from the old system so the thought of manually having to add each one to VS is pretty non-viable. I could translate the text descriptions into XML if there is a way to feed an XML description of a Form into a VS Forms project...?

Any advice\\direction towards this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

VS uses code generation to create controls in Windows Forms. If you look at a form eg Form1 that's in your project, it consists of three files, Form1.cs , Form1.designer.cs and Form1.resx . The Form1.designer.cs file contains the construction of the controls in the InitializeComponent method. VS executes this and parses it at design time to give you the design view of the form where you can make modifications. You could write a program to parse your text files and generate C# code for InitializeComponent to get the right effect. There are various options but you probably would want to use the CSharpCodeProvider class.

Another option is to use WPF. Forms are designed in WPF using XAML, which is an XML based format. (By that I mean, an XAML document is also a valid XML document, but the reverse is not true.) If you create a WPF project and add some controls to it then you could take a look at the XAML file to get an idea of the structure.