Automatic regenerate designer files

Question

Recently I've been making some improvements to a lot of the controls we use, for example give properties default values and making buttons private instead of protected. By making this kind of adjustments you need to regenerate the designer files of the forms which have this control on it or controls which inherit from the control.

In the past this wasn't really a problem because we only had 20-30 forms. At the moment we've got more than 300 forms which would mean opening the same amount of designers in VS2010.

So my question: do you know a way of automating this process so all of the forms get regenerated?

I've been thinking about a macro which looks for designer files and opens the file (with a max of 25-50 files open to make sure VS won't crash), but I've not been able to get this working.

I hope someone has a suggestion!

Answer 1

The only way I found to do what you want, is to open the form designer, add a control, then save. This will regenerate the designer code. Next delete the newly added control, save again, and close.

I usually add a button by double-clicking on the button in the toolbox. This puts the button at location 0,0.

I did this a couple months ago with a project with about 100 form and user-controls. Instead of a macro that recursed over the project files, I recorded a temporary macro then ran the macro for each form/user-control and inspected the results.

Do not confuse refactoring with reformatting. I often optimize and/or modify the designer code in large forms. For example, I will change the order controls are added to panels, and how panels are added to other panels. I would not blindly regenerate the designer code.

Answer 2

I also ran into this problem (see also: Force WinForms to regenerate .designer.cs files).

In the end, most of the properties I removed were uniquely named, and I was able to write a shell script to remove lines from the designer files that contained the property names.

Note, this actually removes the line, not just leaving a blank line.
It needs to be run from a Bash Shell, if you have msysgit installed, that shell is fine.
In this one, TextForeColor was the property being removed.

#!/bin/bash
files=$(find . -type f -name '*.Designer.cs' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l 'TextForeColor')
for file in $files
do
    echo $file
    sed '/TextForeColor/ d' $file >$file.tmp
    mv $file.tmp $file
done

Answer 3

Employ form's inheritance instead of maintaining changes over 300 controls.