Create Application Forms development project

To perform Application Forms development in Microsoft Visual Studio you need a Visual Studio project. A project is the workspace for your development that holds references to all source files, resources and externally referenced assemblies. When developing with Visual Studio, projects can be created for a variety of technologies and languages. IFS Application Forms is developed in .NET C# so for this purpose we need to create an IFS specific C# project.

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Create project from template

The Application Forms project template is part of the IFS Visual Studio Extension Development package which is installed from the IFS Tool Disk. For information on how to setup your development environment see Setup Development Environment.

Figure 1: A step by step illustration of how to create a new project.

  1. Open the new projects dialog from the File\New sub menu.
  2. In the Project types list view under the Visual C# node, select IFS Application Forms.
    (If Visual C# does not contain an IFS Application Forms node, then the IFS Visual Studio Extensions most likely has not been installed correctly.)
  3. Select the IFS Application Forms template in the Templates list.
  4. Update the default given project name to reflect your project.
    Naming syntax of an IFS Application component assembly is Ifs.Application.<identifier>
  5. Update project location.

    Make sure that you create your project in the workspace folder in the correct development structure.

  6. Finish the creation of the project by confirming the dialog through the OK button.

Note: The Create directory for solution checkbox, if checked, will add another level to the project folder structure. This should not be used for IFS projects. Your top folder should contain both your project file .csproj as well as the solution .sln. Exception to this rule would be if you are in the process of adding a new project to an already existing solution for which you might need the extra level.

Project Location

The project location is where your project should be created. The new project template wizard will create a folder with the same name as your project at the given location. For the example in Figure 1, a folder named c:\Dev\75_SP4\Workspace\Ifs.Application.New1 is created.

Practically, when working with an IFS Applications component, the location shall reflect the structure used in Harvest, so  .\workspace\<component_name>\source\<component_name>\client\ should be used.

Application Forms template result

The reason to use a template to create a project is because the template provides foundation for high productivity and consistency. The parts that the IFS Application Forms template adds are: