Soledad Pano's Blog

When developing a Visual Studio Addin it is a common task to add custom commands to existing menus and toolbars. It is a common problem too, not to find the proper command bar (we have to traverse all command bars to see its names, the names are not unique, etc). In these two posts: Using IVsProfferCommands to retrieve a Visual Studio CommandBar and  Using EnableVSIPLogging to identify menus and commands with VS 2005 + SP1 it is very well explained how to solve this problem.

I attended yesterday to the Microsoft Code Camp event at Buenos Aires. It was fun!

On this month's edition of the Level Extreme .Net Magazine, my article about Building an UI Automation Client Application was published. The article walks through building a client application for automating a win 32 target application (the Windows Address Book). The idea is to show through simple code snippets how to use the UI Automation API for manipulating a target application programmatically through its UI. It shows how to find the UI elements, and how to work with the UI Automation patterns and handle events. The sample client application code contains further examples and can be downloaded from the article's page. Hope you read it!

It is often necessary to listen to external application UI events when automating applications in CCF. For example, we may need to save a value in the Context if the user presses a button, or do something when an alert dialog appears. There are many ways we can handle events. In CCF 2008, the Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) provides an easy way to listen to them. If not using HAT we can hook to events using the UIAutomation or MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) APIs within our own application adapters.

Some months ago I posted about Hosting a Windows Form Control in a web page. I explained there how we can run a WinForm control from Internet Explorer by hosting it in a web page using the <object> tag. Now suppose you want to use the same solution in a custom web part that is included in a Sharepoint site. I will describe here where the control library should be placed and how it can be referenced from the web part.

Although Data Driven Adapters (DDAs) are mainly designed for Automation Adapters in HAT, we can make use of them from legacy adapters, too. Here's an example of an external VB application, which is configured to use a legacy application adapter and a WinDataDrivenAdapter with the corresponding bindings:

The Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) is a new component of CCF 2.6 (2008) that facilitates the task of automating the UI of the hosted applications. It consists of two main parts: the Data Driven Adapters (DDA) and the Automations (WF workflows) that automates the hosted application using the DDAs.

My colleagues Ariel Neisen, Federico García, Rodolfo Finochietti and I wrote the cover article of the #42 edition of the .Code Magazine (in Spanish) about Silverlight. The article talks about this new technology's fundamentals, architecture, programming tools, advanced features, code samples and a lot more.