DevExpress CodeRush Tips&Tricks

These are two primary types of plug-ins you can create:

1. Standard Plug-in

The standard plug-in is a workhorse of the extensibility landscape. It serves as a container for DXCore components, such as actions, providers, and your custom event handlers.

• Tool Window

Tool windows are modeless forms that can be docked inside the Visual Studio IDE. The Solution Explorer, Toolbox, and Property Browser are all examples of tool window plug-ins. Creating a tool window plug-in is easy. Just arrange your components in the tool window designer, set a few properties, and compile the project.

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This command reduces the selection using the same logical blocks by which it was last increased via the Selection Increase feature. If you accidentally overshoot the block you want to select, you can reduce the selection using NUM- key or CTRL+Shift+W keys.

Selection Increase is a command for a quick selection of continuous logical code blocks. For example, if the caret is inside an expression, you can quickly expand the selection so it entirely holds the expression. The ability to quickly define a selection around a logical block is useful for refactoring. For example, if you’d like to extract a piece of code into a method or property – the Selection Increase will help you define your code block for extraction very quickly. You can also use it to quickly select code you want to move to another location or select any member and/or type declarations. Just place the caret at the beginning of the declaration you want to select, and press the shortcut. This command is bound to NUM+ key or Ctrl+W key. After increasing a selection, you can reduce it using the Selection Reduce command by pressing the NUM- key.

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The Introduce Parameter Object refactoring consolidates selected parameters into single object. If you frequently need to pass similar sets of values to methods that tend to be passed together, it might be useful to encapsulate these values into an object that carries all of this data. It is worthwhile to turn these parameters into objects just to group the data together. As the result, calling statements will become more compact and you will be able to add data processing logic to the newly declared object. This refactoring is also useful because it reduces the size of the parameter lists, and long parameter lists are hard to read and understand.

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Also known as Remove Unused Parameter. This refactoring removes an unused parameter from a method declaration, and updates all calls accordingly. It is very useful when a parameter is no longer used by the method body. A spurious parameter doesn’t cause any problems, and you probably might need it again later. But most of the time this is the wrong choice, because a parameter indicates information that is needed. In this case, a caller has to worry about what values to pass for a fictitious, unused parameter. By not removing the parameter you are making further work for everyone who uses the method.

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The refactoring adds a new parameter to a method declaration and updates all calls accordingly. This refactoring is useful when you need to quickly add a new parameter to an existing method because it needs more information from its caller that wasn’t passed in before. Bear in mind that if there are alternatives available against doing this refactoring, it is preferred to use those alternatives instead, because they don’t lead to increasing the length of parameters lists. Long parameter lists are hard to remember and often involve data clumps.

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Note, this article has been moved to the official DevExpress Support Center site. Please refer to the moved article as it might have further updates or additional comments. Thank you.

It is possible to prevent the IDE Tools from being loaded automatically when starting Visual Studio.

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IDE tools installation can be launched in silent (without GUI and no questions asked) mode. Here’s a sample command line:

IDETools-10.1.0.exe /Q /EMAIL:myaddress@company.com /CUSTOMERID:A1234 /PASSWORD:MYPASS /DEBUG
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