#develop .96 Forms Designer Improvements

1) What's New
2) Changes
3) Where to Download
4) Where to Report Bugs

1) What's New

At the end of this year's #develop summer camp, we bring you this new release of #develop it has been a long wait. We have focused on improving the forms designer: a more stable roundtripping has been implemented, the forms designer now sports a functioning menu designer, components can be selected in a new dropdown in the property grid, resetting properties of controls to default values via a context menu has been added, the toolbox is configurable with custom controls, user controls can be reloaded automatically - additionally, many more smaller changes and bug fixes have been incorporated.

A very cool new feature is the C# to VB.NET converter based on our new Coco/R [1] - generated parser (see Tools / Convert Buffer C# to VB.NET). Note that it sometimes must take heuristic decisions, but this will change once we convert entire projects (at issue is type lookup which is impossible without knowing all project-local and referenced types). Aside from the major parser infrastructure change to Coco/R [1], other parts of the SharpDevelop infrastructure have been designed for more flexible use in different scenarios. Please see the section Changes for more details.

[1] http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Projects/Coco/CSharp/

2) Changes

* Faster loading
* Forms Designer menu editor added
* C# to VB.NET converter
* User controls are automatically reloaded in referencing project (on build)
* Before and After Build scripts added
* Component selection dropdown added to property grid
* Property grid context menu
* Tooltips in task pane
* File reload (Ctrl+U) prompts for reload
* Sidebar configuration dialog
* Assembly Scout reworked

3) Where to Download

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/download/

4) Where to Report Bugs

We do have an automatic error reporting dialog when #develop crashes with an unhandled exception. It will automatically take you to

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/BugReporting.aspx

where you can paste the error information. On non-exception bugs, go to the above location and provide us with .NET and OS version information.

In both cases, please do not forget to provide us with step by step instructions to reproduce the bug. Thank you for helping make #develop a more functional and stable product!

The #develop Team