RADE

C++ Interactive Dashboard

Customizing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

How to access CAA V5 tools from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Technical Article

Abstract

This article is intended for people developing with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. They can find here the way to use CAA V5 tools without leaving their favorite environment. Note that Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is designed to be run on 64-bit platforms.

The first part of the article explains how to set up Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to add new menus and commands and the second part points out the commands to apply on any CAA V5 File Tree to work on their files from within the Microsoft environment.

In the rest of this article, labels of buttons or menus from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 are written using "this format".

Customizing Visual Studio 2005
Mapping a CAA V5 File Tree
- Mapping Projects to Frameworks and Modules
- Setting the current Active Project
In Short

Customizing Visual Studio 2005

After installing the product on a workstation, the customization of Visual Studio 2005 is enabled by default at startup. 2 CAA menu items in the File Menu: New CAA V5 Workspace... and Open CAA V5 Workspace...

Other CAA menu items are displayed only after opening or creating a CAA V5 Workspace:

By default, all add-ins installed on the machine are activated. You can choose to deactivate some of them using Tools/Add-in Manager...

You can deactivate add-ins during your current session (1rst column), or deactivate for next startup (2nd column).

When first opening Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, the dialog box opposite is displayed. It is strongly recommended to create the new keyboard mapping scheme. To do so, proceed as follows:

From the Tools menu, select Customize.... The Customize window is displayed.
Click Keyboard....
In the Options dialog box, create your shortcuts.
Click OK and Close when done.

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Mapping a CAA V5 File Tree

The integration principle we have chosen is that Visual Studio 2005 uses the concepts of solutions and projects:

The concept of "solution" of Visual Studio 2005 is mapped with the concept of workspace used in CAA V5, this identifies a set of projects where developers write programs.
"Projects" of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 are identified as coherent pieces of software, they contain program and resources files and produce either a library (dll) or an executable. The correspondences between projects and CAA V5 concepts are:
- Any framework leads to a project
- Any module leads to a project

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Mapping Projects to Frameworks and Modules

From the `Fil`e menu, select `Open CAA V5 Workspace..`. The dialog box which is displayed lets you open an existing workspace in order to work with mkmk (what is proposed in our example) or with mkmk and the Workspace Manager (if installed). Specify the workspace root directory (`E:\Visual_Studio_2005` in our example) and possibly the version of mkmk (CXR17 in our example), the choice of the version is not proposed if only one version is detected.

The first time a CAA V5 workspace is opened, a message is displayed informing the user that his workspace does not contain any generated projects.

A new window is then automatically displayed in which the user can select the framework and module for which a project will be generated. Note that you do not have to generate a project for all frameworks and modules that can be found in a workspace. For performance reasons on projects loading, and also for ease of use, we recommend you to generate projects only for the modules you are currently working on. Projects can be regenerated at any time. To do so, select Project->Select CAAV5 Projects.
A file tree appears in the window which can be expanded/collapsed to respectively display or hide internal modules.
Check any framework/module to select it for project generation.
Tips:
- If you check a framework, projects will be generated for it and for all the modules it contains.
- Conversely if you check only a subset of the modules in a framework, a project will be generated for this framework and the checked modules, other modules will not be processed.

Click OK to generate projects for the selected frameworks and modules. A log window is displayed while generating project information and once finished Visual Studio 2005 displays this information. Here is the corresponding generated projects displayed in the Solution Explorer or in the Class View.

Setting the Current Active Project

For several commands of the RADE interactive dashboard, you will need to set a current active Project. For example, when you create a new class with RADE, you need to set the corresponding module where you can to create the class, as the current active project. To do this, right-click the module project in the Solution Explorer or in the Class View and select Set as StartUp Project. Note that you can also select Set as StartUp Project in the Project menu.

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In Short

Now you are ready to work using both the Visual Studio 2005 environment and CAA V5 tools. The next article we advise you to read is Working with Visual Studio 2005 [1] where you will find explanations about how to use others commands. If you are familiar with mkmk commands or Workspace Manager commands, you will find the corresponding Visual Studio 2005 menus and commands in Workbench Commands Mapping [2].

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References

[1]	Working with the RADE C++ interactive DashBoard
[2]	Workbench Commands Mapping
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History

Version: 1 [November 2005]	Document created
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