Develop Reference

Windows Universal App 8.1 Custom User Control

For the past two weeks, I have a problem which I cannot resolve. Believe me, I have been looking for answers all over the internet without finding any solution let alone hints.
I am currently working on a Windows 8.1 Universal App. I have developed a pattern lock control (control A) similar to the one known from android devices. The control is composed of 9 points which are represented by instances of a different control (control B). Control A as well as controls B have their own dependency properties. Some of which have concrete values (e.g. StrokeBrushThickness="2") while others have a value that is defined within the app resources (e.g. Brushes).
The problem I am facing is that everything works well for the Windows Phone project. However, when I reference control A inside the Windows project I receive following XAML error for the A's dependency properties that have concrete values:
Unknown error: Cannot find a resource with the given key.
If I remove the aforementioned properties from the control, the app compiles but throws a Windows.UI.Xaml.Markup.XamlParseException during runtime:
WinRT-Informationen: Failed to assign to property < PROPERTY NAME >
Moreover, I get the following XAML error for a some resources I have defined within the app, e.g.:
<Color x:Key="ColorBackground">#F4F2F4</Color>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="AppBackgroundBrush" Color="{ThemeResource ColorBackground}"/>
I can sort of get the whole thing to work if I remove control A and place the point controls (B) directly into a grid. However, I hope to avoid this workaround as you can image control A encapsulates a lot of functionality that is needed repeatedly across the app.
I hope I have made myself clear. If not, I'll be more than happy to provide further information.
Thank you in advance!

Probably you have failed to register your dependency properties correctly.
Check the parameters you pass to DependencyProperty.Register method.
Probably you throw an exception from your property changed callback, you shouldn't do that.
P.S. It is sometimes easier to use Expression Blend to edit those XAMLs. You will spend some time learning, the tool is not targeted towards programmers; it is for designers, so the user experience is completely different. However, if you will invest some time, it is very unlikely you will ever face problems like “Cannot find a resource with the given key”.

VS.Net2013 Designer removes custom controls instantiation

I have one project with my forms, etc. and one DLL-Project with UserControls and extended Controls, all with .Net4.5.1 and WinForms. A few weeks ago I did a migration from VS-Net2013 but the custom controls I'm talking about did not exist at that time. With every edit in my form inside Designer the new Form.Designer.cs is missing the instantiation of my custom gridview. All other parts regarding this control are still in the designer-code.
public class RichGridView : DataGridView { ... }
The missing part in Form.Designer.cs is:
this.dataDGV = new RichGridView(Definitions.DataType);
I can put this line back for myself into the designer-code but that's not how it should be. I was checking whether there are other files where VS might store information about the controls handled in its designer file but didn't found something. A while ago the designer has thrown away that line only a couple of times, so I could edit my form in the designer-window without problems and very seldom the instantiation was thrown away, now with every edit.
The other Project containing the DLL with my custom controls was compiled successfully and available for my Forms-Project, furthermore there was no change at all in the other project. If the point is that the custom control is outside the Forms-Project: I had to do this due to constraints in VS when dealing with UserControls regarding 32 vs 64 bit and debugging possibilities.
Not sure if there is some part of my code necessary for this question.

Visual studio shows endless messages "Code generation for property 'valueMember' failed."

After several days of happily hacking away on this C# app using Visual Studio 2008, I get struck by a barrage of error dialogs showing:
Code generation for property 'valueMember' failed.
Error was: 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object.'
This happens now often when I make a tiny change in the designer, e.g. shift a control a few pixels, and then try to save. Several such error dialogs appear each second, keeping me busy cancelling all those by hammering the Enter key while trying to get alt-F4 to get VS to close.
Eventually I do get VS to close and to save the changes I made. After restarting VS, I do "clean" on the entire project, then "build" and everything works fine, the app runs fine, no problems.
Until I make another slight change in the form designer.
I don't know about any property valueMember in my app.
This makes me crazy, it is a real showstopper for my project. Any help is appreciated.

Try to Close and reopen the Visual Studio. maybe it seem silly, but it works!!

You can debug the designer using another visual studio and attach to process. If you got exception it should be easy to find it that way.
In general when openning the designer the constructor and of course initializeComponent is running.

As this is happening at design time, it is likely that you have a custom control which requires a parameter or other value which does not have a default.
When in design view in Visual Studio; a control instance is created to render it on the visual editor, but if the control requires a property to be set before it can be rendered, it will result in an error.
Can you check that all custom controls have default values, and anything referenced in the constructor that cannot have a default is wrapped by DesignMode property - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.component.designmode.aspx.

Similiar to #Chanipoz's answer (close/re-open) my component-rich/user-controls-everywhere forms app started to compile happily after I closed down the main form designer window.
I've had this code stack for years and have never seen the error until today. Not sure where it's coming from. But, something today about having the form open in the designer made everything unhappy. Simply closing it off of the screen made it all go smooth.

Use another instance of Visual Studio to attach to the first instance of visual studio.
Go to Debug-> Attach To Process and look for the devenv.exe process. Since you'll have two devenv.exe processes running you'll probably want to pick the one with the lower ID, that's usually the first instance of visual studio that was run.

I had to face this problem. As I have found the solution below
I am facing this issue in my customized control.
we need to implement like this
[Browsable(false)]
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Hidden)]
public MyCustomclass _Prperty { get; set; }

I had to face this problem. As I have not found the solution (much inheritance), I can tell:
.SuspendLayout() and .ResumeLayout() may be missing in code or one of them. The same is with .BeginInit() and .EndInit(). It is expected between them, that there will be = new ... and some settings for properties. Maybe someone facing this problem would find the solution with this information.

The problem is missing initialization code for a public property on the control. This will be added for you when you add the control to the designer, but if you replace a control with a derived control, or update the component, then the designer does not know how to deal with this.
If you have a control (wincontrol) with a public property PropertyA, and you add it to a form (myForm), then the designer will add all the necessary initialization for properties into myForm.Designer.cs. Something like;
Wincontrol1.PropertyA = new List<widget>();
It is not uncommon to need to modify a control slightly, lets say we have a new control MyWinControl
public partial class MyWinControl : WinControl
{
public List<wodget> PropertyDer1;
protected List<wodget> PropertyDer2;
}
If you sub this new control for the old control in myForm.Designer.cs, then you may well encounter this issue. The reason is that PropertyDer1 has no initialization in the winforms designer. PropertyDer2 won't cause any issues because it is protected. Similarly if you had a custom component and you add a new public property after the component has been added to a form.
If however, you deleted the instance of WinControl on the form, and dragged an instance of the MyWinControl onto the form instead, the proper initialization would occur and you would not see the error. The designer will have created the new control like this
Wincontrol1.PropertyA = new List<widget>();
Wincontrol1.PropertyDer1= new List<wodget>();
There are two easy solutions that do not require hiding the property from the designer.
1. If the property doesn't need to be public, give it the right modifier
2. If the property does need to be public, then just edit the code in the myForm.Designer.cs as in the code above to add the missing initializer

If could be of help I just detected a case that brings that same error message, impossible to take away :
I am developing an application in French, and I had to create a ToolStripMenuItem with an accented word in it like "annulées".
The system generated a menu item like "annuléesToolStripMenuItem" and the accent is the culprit.
Enough to delete the item, create it again in English and the just change the Text property of the menu item.
Hope it will be of some help.

Workflow rehosted designer

I wish I could understand how the loading of xaml files into rehosted designer works. Depends of xaml definition I get different results.
Xaml, root node in the file is Activity that cointans flowchart. Here it's enough using desinger.Load(xamlFileName) with (new DesignerMetadata).Register() after creating the designer (anyone know what kind of magic is that?) In the designer I get workflow that looks like in visual studio editor.
Xaml, root node is Flowchart itself. The same steps give me only one, bare activity in the designer. I tried wrapping workflow in activity builder according to this(I have a similar problem). There are no problems with assemblies(at least I think so), no exceptions. I can't make it work like in previous point.
Is there any difference between xaml saved in visual studio and xaml saved in rehosted designer?
ActivityXamlServices.Load sometimes returns DynamicActivity, sometimes the target workflow. What does it depend on?
Thank you for any support.

Turns out that it depends on the argument given to the rehosted designer. If I start with new Flowchart, the root node in xaml will be flowchart. When loading such file later to the designer you dont need to wrap it. If you started with ActivityBuilder you might need to use WorkflowInspectionServices to get the workflow before loading xaml.
Sometimes to show workflow properly in the designer you need to use (new DesignerMetadata).Register() from proper assembly, but its not always necessary, I'm not sure what does it depend on.

C# component do not refresh when source code updated

I have a solution with many projects. One project contain few custom components. One of these components is used to display a title on an image. We can change the color of the background and many other things.
The problem is IF I decide to change the default color of the background of the component or change the position of the text, thoses change won't reflect in all other projects of the solution where the component is used. I have compilent the project of the component and all other projects Reference the component by the Project.
For the moment, what I have to do is to take off the component from the other project one by one and to add it back, then all is fine. Do you have a quick way to do it?
UPDATE
I have added a CheckBox inside that component and it seems that the checkbox is everywhere! Fine! But when a property has a some tag that let the component to change (example like the Background color) it doesn't change the "default" value but instead put the old value as a changed value in the property. So, I see the old value setted like if I add manually changed the color in the Properties panel when I haven't...
UPDATE 2
alt text http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/9112/oldonenewoneei0.png
Update 3:
This problem is still here. Just to let people know that I am still curious to find a way.
I have tried few of your suggestions.
If I clean all the solution and build only the project that has the Custom control then I build the solution. Nothing change (To test it, I have change the color of the component to Yellow. Nothing change : fail.
If I remove the reference and add it back to the project and then rebuild the solution. I can see the old color in the designer : fail.
I have updated the question with more information and an image (above) for those who want to try to help me.
As you can see, the old "compile" of the component show the Yellow background but when I insert a new component (from the Left Tool bar in Visual Studio) I can have the new component with the supposed WHITE background...

This is most likely due to references.
Your other projects probably copy in a reference to your component project. You'll have to rebuild these other projects for them to re-copy in the referenced component project, if it has changed. It is only updated at build time.
You can somewhat get around this by having them part of the same solution. In that case, you can set up your project dependencies correctly and it should handle things for you mostly automatically. But having everything in the same solution isn't always the right thing to do.
If you already have them part of the same solution or it's not a references problem, it might be due to component serialization. We've run into this quirk a lot when doing custom control development.

My guess is that the designer is smart and remembers the settings for the component as you have it in the designer and thus sees it as the default.

This doesn't sound usual. Right clicking on the solution and hitting "Clean Solution" might help (it will delete all dlls and executables from each project's bin directory, which forces fresh builds to occur)
You might also want to check your build order sequence.

I work on a project that has a similar problem, I have found that if you touch the .NET config file or assembly information file (depending on your project type). The other projects will then reflect the component change...
I'm not sure why this happens, but this is how I overcome it...
Recently I have switch to building everything via Nant, and that takes care of the problem altogether.

Sometimes the Visual Designer serialize all your properties in the code-behind, even if they have the default value.
If your component have a default backcolor of Red, and you change the default backcolor to Blue, the components that use your component will change it back to Red.