Fixing Visual Studio.NET Style Builder

Mad props go to Christopher Williams for pointing out a way to update the Visual Studio.NET 2003 style builder with CSS2.1. In my article Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET I only outlined how to get the VS.NET designer to include CSS2.1 properties in IntelliSense. Chris points out which DLL to update to get the style builder to do the same.

On a related note, I’m still trying to figure out how to force the Add Style Rule dialog box (pictured below) to show proper CSS properties. As you can tell from the screen shot, taken in VS.NET 2005, the dialog is, well, somewhat outdated. It’s reading the list of CSS properties from somewhere. I asked Microsoft folks at the MVP Summit where this list comes from, and their best bet was that it was all hard coded.

I used Process Explorer to track down which DLL this dialog box lives in. Point your resource decompiler of choice (such as ResourceHacker) to Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\Packages\1033\csspkgui.dll and expand Dialog\1100\1033.

The missing bit is to find which list populates the Element: dropdown. It seems more and more probable that it’s hard coded indeed. If anyone knows better, please tell me.

This bug was submitted to Product Feedback Center in June of this year (see FDBK29909) but the fix didn’t get in the door, so we’ll live with it until the next iteration. For now, I’d simply stay away from this dialog. It’s not that useful anyway. Build your CSS rules by hand.