Designer Analyzer Overview

The CodeSMART Designer Analyzer is an extremely valuable tool that can be used to examine Visual Basic components for identifying designers and controls that can lead to inconsistent user interfaces. It can be seen as both a user interface quality control tool and a user interface standard enforcement tool with all the advantages that result from these.

The Designer Analyzer covers three major problem areas:

• Designer issues: refers to most common designer-related (form, user control, user document, property page etc) issues.
• Control issues: refers to control-related problems.
• Other (general) issues: refers to problems that could not be included in the above two but still apply to the application user interface.

To analyze a Visual Basic application user interface:

1. Open the project or group you want to analyze.
2. Optional. Select a project or open a component if you want to narrow the operation scope upon.
3. Click Designer Analyzer in the Reviews popup menu on the Other Tools toolbar or select the same entry in the CodeSMART main menu in order to display the Designer Analyzer dialog box (quick toolbar and menu references are available).

   

4. Specify the operation scope. Depending on the currently active item in the Visual Basic IDE, only valid options are listed.
5. Navigate through the corresponding tab controls and update the settings according to the current operation requirements.
6. Press Begin to start the designer analysis operation. Once the operation finishes the results are displayed into the Reviews pane on the Enhanced Immediate window.

   

7. Each item in the Reviews pane contains all the data needed to locate the faulty designer/control or problematic code and (if applicable) a suggestion on how to solve the reported problem. You can double click an item to go directly to the location that corresponds to the accused problem.

 Note

• If you want to skip a certain component from designer analysis, then you should place the CodeSMART 'CSDA: Skip comment marker inside that component general declaration area (available through the main menu).

Back To Top