How does the Visual studio populate the references tab?
By using something like currentDomain.GetAssemblies() or what?
Visual Studio will search for all assemblies in the "reference paths".
Reference paths can be defined per-project using a project property; but they can also be set in the registry.
Take a look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders.
Which references "tab" are you referring to? The Add Reference dialog has a tab for .NET , COM, and Projects (plus the Browse and Recent tabs, which you probably aren't interested in.
The most obvious one is Projects, which simply shows you the projects in your solution that aren't already added as a reference to the current project.
For COM, it looks at all of the COM components which have registered TypeLibs from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib.
The .NET tab uses the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders registry key for the list of folder paths. It also looks at %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies or %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies (again, depending on the version). If you have VS2008 installed, you can also add additional paths per project in the "Reference Paths" tab of the project properties.
Related
I am new to visual studio, I am trying to add "Inventor" reference, I added it from Solution expolrere - Dependancies - Rightclick - Add project reference. However, it may not inserted correctly because I can see it doen't get intelegency in code when I try to accesss the Inventor API.
Second thing,Does the Add project reference and Add reference is different thing?
Moreover, why I cannot see "Add reference" instead of "Dependancies"?
I am using Visual studio 2019.
I am trying to generate a manifest for a set of COM objects that are being used in our code as registration-free COM.
For that purpose I created a VB project in VS 2010 and added the COM objects DLLs as dependencies. The problem is I do not see them listed as dependencies in the generated manifest. Am I missing something simple like a project setting to generate the proper manifest listing the dependencies?
You left out too many details and the VB.NET IDE hides too much to do this right. It is not automatic.
Starting point is to force it to show more. Locate the "Show All Files" toolbar button in the Solution Explorer window (use the tooltip to find it back). Click it and you now get the "References" node added to the project.
Open it and locate the COM component that you added to the project. Select it and look at the Properties window. Set the "Isolated" property to True. Rebuild the project. Be sure to look in the Output window for any warnings. And to look at the .manifest file on disk instead of the one the IDE shows you if you added a manifest to your project yourself.
Just to start off, this question does seem very similar to another post Add the DLL (lame_enc.dll) reference to my project, but I haven't been able to successfully apply that answer. I am pretty new to VB.NET so it is very possible I'm simply missing something obvious.
I am trying to link a DLL to a VB.NET 2010 project to allow my VB app to play *.ogg files. I followed some other advice here on the forums and downloaded FMOD's FMOD Ex Programmers API. I am trying to now reference that functionality. These appear to be the files I need to somehow reference.
C:\Program Files (x86)\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD Programmers API Windows\api\fmodex64.dll.
C:\Program Files (x86)\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD Programmers API Windows\api\libfmodex64_vc.lib.
I haven't discovered how to add a *.lib reference (or the equivalent), but selecting the DLL as a reference gives the following error.
A reference to 'C:\Program Files (x86)\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD
Programmers API Windows\api\fmodex64.dll' could not be added. Please
make sure that the file is accessible, and that it is a valid assembly
or COM component.
I'm not sure what I could be missing. Any ideas? Thanks!
In Solution Explorer, double-click the My Project node for the project.
In the Project Designer, click the References tab.
Click the Add button to open the Add Reference dialog box.
In the Add Reference dialog box, select the tab indicating the type of component you want to reference.
Select the components you want to reference, then click OK.
Another approach I was trying is working for me. I found a site with a working example of a LibZPlay VB.NET sample ( http://planetsourcecode.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=7789&lngWId=10 ). It runs under VS 2008 and I was able to adapt my project to use LibZPlay (open source library http://libzplay.sourceforge.net/WELCOME.html ) under VS 2008.
That is sufficient for me for now. Thanks for your advice. It was likely some configuration issue or misunderstanding on my end.
Using VB.net 2015 I (could not add or even find a System32 dll) as a reference using Solution Explorer, Tab References. Going to the MAIN Menu, Projects/Add References...
Used Browse and All the System32 dll were visible. Then I was able to load the needed dll.
What is a standard way to open the Designer (automatically generated) code for a VB file?
As a workaround, I can get to it by searching the entire solution for some keyword that is usually only found in those files: Global, Partial, etc.
Open the Solution Explorer. Along the toolbar at the top there is a tool Show All Files (it is the 2nd from the left on my version of visual studio). Click on that tool. All of your Form files will now have an arrow beside them. click on that arrow to expand. Look for the code file named FormName.designer.vb. Double-click on it to open.
You have to click the "show all files"-Button. Then you can also see the Designer.vb-files.
Note: For C# and VS 2008, but the same applies to VB in VS 2010.
http://peterkellner.net/2007/12/31/visualstudioshowallfiles/
http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2009/09/14/visual-studio-tip-show-all-file/
Keyboard shortcut for Show All Files
Show All Files is a useful little button in the Visual Studio solution explorer to give us a full view of the directory structure our project files are sitting in. When it is off, we only see the files that are explicitly included in the project, but when it is on, we see everything. This makes it very easy to explicitly opt a file into the project without doing an add -> existing item -> find existing item in directory structure and add to project.
The default when creating a new Visual Basic application in Visual Studio is to not show all files, and unfortunatly there is no setting you can adjust to change that.
Open the code file, and in the top-right corner of the code window is a drop-down containing all methods. Open this and select "InitializeComponent".
A screenshot from a newer version. Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 will look like this.
Basically, what I want to is be able to explore an ActiveX DLL.
I normally fire up VB 6, add the DLL to the "References" of the project, and use Object Explorer.
However, in this particular machine I can't install VB / VS.
I'm sure there's a tool out there that does this. Does anyone know of one?
Thanks
If the machine has Microsoft Office installed, you can go into the built-in Visual Basic for Applications IDE and load the object there:
Tools menu -> Macro -> Visual Basic Editor (or press Alt+F11)
Then when inside the VBA window, Tools menu -> References -> Browse to locate your DLL
and View menu -> Object Browser to view the object's content (or press F2)
I've used Microsoft's OLE/COM Object Viewer for this. It used to be installed with older versions of Visual Studio, and is still part of the Windows SDK.
It also seems to be available separately -- this is from an older version of the Windows SDK, but I don't imagine this tool has changed much recently.
To view the type information for a particular DLL or OCX, File, View TypeLib... is the option you're looking for. You can also dig through the Controls group in the main window to view details on a registered control. Right-click the entry for the control and click View Type Information to see details on the types and methods it exposes.
This will show rather more information than VB6 would. If you're looking at an ActiveX control, the coclass and dispinterface sections of the type library display are the things to look at.
(There's also an Expert Mode option in the View menu -- this will show you pretty much everything stored in the Registry to do with COM, OLE and ActiveX. This is generally rather a lot of information...)
Is it possible to download the component from that machine and examine it locally in Visual Studio? (That'd be my first suggestion.) (And BTW, the .NET versions of Visual Studio also feature a VB6-like Object Explorer which works nicely for this.)
Alternatively, and it's not free, but you might try ActiveXplorer. (I haven't tried this, but it looks promising.) (Discontinued)