1. Improved Forms
Designer
The Forms Designer in Visual Studio 2005
has been improved to allow for more uniform and consistent control
placement using Snaplines. Snaplines are visual cues that appear
in close proximity to a control when it is dragged onto a form
from the toolbox. They provide visual suggestions as to where to
place a control relative to other existing controls on the form.
Think of this feature as
a replacement to “snapto
grid”. Instead of a control “snapping” to a specific location on
the form, a control now “snaps” to a preferred
location relative to other controls on the form.
2. Office 2003 look-and-feel using
Toolstrips
Visual Studio 2005 provides Toolstrip
controls that consist of menus, toolbars, context menus, and
status bars that provide the same look and feel as Office 2003
applications. Now, applications you develop with Visual Studio
2005 will have thesame
professional look and feel as Office 2003. With the
current development environment, you would need to purchase third-party menu and
toolbar controls to get the same look
and feel as Office 2003.
3. Native Active Document
Control
Active Documents is a COM-based feature of
Microsoft Office that allows you to embed an instance of a Word or
Excel document as an OLE server. Because this is COM-based
technology, accomplishing this in .NET requires that you implement
a COM-based OCX control using C++ and ATL and then wrap this
control with a .NET Runtime Callable Wrapper (RCW). The native
Active Document control provided in
Visual Studio 2005 does all this for you in a single
native control.
4. Improved Data Binding Features
Visual Studio 2005 now provides a data-centric method of
creating a data-bound form instead of the current control-centric
approach. In the current version of Visual Studio, you would use
the forms designer to layout the controls which you wish to be
data bound, then define the data source and data connection for
the controls, and then go back to the properties of each control
to define the field that is data bound. In Visual Studio 2005, you
define the data source and data connection first, and are
presented with the collection of data fields that are represented
by the data source in a new pane called the DataSet Designer.
Using the DataSet Designer, you define the type of control you’d
like for each data field. After you’ve done this for all data
fields, you simply drag-and-drop the DataSet onto the form, and
the forms designer lays out all the data-bound controls on the
form for you!
5. New DataNavigator Control
Visual Studio 2005 provides a new DataNavigator control that
makes it simple to implement a data-bound form. Think of this
control as a “VCR Control” that contains move first, move
previous, move next, and move last buttons, as well as a dropdown
used to move to a specific record. In addition, add record, update
record, and delete record buttons are also provided. This control
works in conjunction with a DataConnector and is based on the
Toolstrip control mentioned above. While this control provides a
standard means of navigation through a DataSet, it is also fully
extensible and pluggable.
