Hi Danny,
As discussed separately note the following:
1. To add controls to a form you don't actually need the licensed controls you only need these if you are doing a form inside Visual Studio and require the WYSIWYG type scenario and doing a form from scratch, to add controls to a form there are examples provided by Jiwa in the plugin samples and you have actually been doing that when you add a button to the ribbon.
2. You don't actually need Visual Studio to do more heavy duty development, although there are certain circumstances under which a class library/ DLL might be a better option than the plugin editor, usually I found this to be for big projects where there could be a lot of classes such as an external api where there needs to be request and response classes that would clutter a plugin and one file is not the easiest option from a coding and maintenance point of view or a class library works for when you want to create code reuse, for example what you are writing might be used by Jiwa and an external executable, the only trick to remember with a class library is anything you want seen from outside the dll must be public and you must make the target X86. Usually if I have done a class library then I create a solution with my class library project and win forms project so I can dump buttons on the form to test my code and when the form loads up I have it login to Jiwa and it keeps a manager as a form variable to work with
3. To get Jiwa to work with Visual Studio is fairly simple if all you are doing is with the business objects you just need to add the Jiwa application dll and the jiwa odbc dll as references to the project and then any relevant dlls such as debtors if you are doing something with debtors or the inventory dll if its inventory, you can even add references to the Infragistics and spread/farpoint dlls if you are doing anything ui related that doesn't need WYSWYG such as adding a button to the ribbon. I usually add code to set an assembly resolver and pass in the Jiwa directory to this so there are no runtime issues see
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1510&p=6500&hilit=resolver#p6500 for an example of this.
4. If you are looking for an example of a full blown form with the necessary business objects take a look at
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1352 in this case I used our licensed versions of the controls in a win forms app to setup the screen that inherited from JiwaFinancials.Jiwa.JiwaApplication.Maintenance.UserInterface which is in Jiwa's application dll and then simply copied the designer code into the plugin once I had done that and wrote the code to hook everything up.
5. If you want to know what is necessary to create business objects Mike generously gave me the the details here
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=474&p=1718&hilit=business+objects#p17186. If you wanted a simple learning exercise I would suggest you could try the following Mike wrote a simple list maintenance plugin found here
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=498 go and create a completely different table with different fields, it doesn't matter what it is and see if you can convert the plugin to work with your table and your fields. I actually did this recently and Widgets became Web Tags in a couple of hours as largely I used Mike's plugin as a skeleton to start from rather than designing up a screen from scratch in Visual Studio as all I needed was similar functionality that is to maintain the look up table.
