Walkthrough Step 7 - Opening the Import from DDS Dialog

Wings Web Site Contents

After you click OK in the previous step, a skeleton Wings Web Site is quickly created. The Visual Studio Solution Explorer window (View->Solution Explorer) shows you the current Web site contents (which include all of its files and folders).

The screenshot in Figure 7-1 below shows Visual Studio's Solution Explorer window. As you extend and enhance the project, a full understanding of the project contents is important, but for our initial purposes of simply getting a display file imported, we can safely ignore most of what's in the project for now.

The Solution Explorer window:

The Solution Explorer shows the components (folders and files) currently defined in your Visual Studio project. In this case, the components you see are the default components created for every Wings Web Site. The contents of the Solution Explorer are shown as a collapsible tree. Click the '+' and '-' signs to toggle any one level's detail in the Solution Explorer. Hover the mouse over the Solution Explorer window below to see more detail on those components. If it isn't showing, use View > Solution Explorer in Visual Studio's main menu bar to see it (it won't necessarily show itself by default).

Figure 7-1.

To set the start page

You will run and test your Wings presentation layer from inside Visual Studio*. To run your Wings app, Visual Studio needs to know which of the application's pages should be the first displayed. To set the application's start page, in the Solution Explorer (use View > Solution Explorer if you need to) and expand the Monarch folder. If elements above the Monarch folder are collapsed, you'll need to expand them to get to the folder. Right-click on the SignOn.aspx page and, in the context menu that appears (as shown in figure 7-2), click Set as Start Page.

Figure 7-2.

Once the Start page is set, we can get down to actually importing a Display File into Wings. The default location for imported display files is in the project's Views folder. In the Solution Explorer (which should still be open) right click the Views folder. This will open a context menu, as shown in Figure 7-3 below select Import Display File from DDS...

Figure 7-3.

Clicking Import Display File from DDS... will open the Import from DDS Dialog, further explained in the next step.