How can I create my own form designer?

Posted by Carson Myers on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Carson Myers
Published on 2010-03-20T06:23:51Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 6:31 UTC
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forms

I'm starting my first C# project, and I want to make a "form designer" (like the one in VS).

The idea is, there will be a visual form designer with a limited toolbox, which will generate Python code (later more) to create the same form.

Problem is, I have no idea how to even get started. First of all, I have the form designer in VS: how do I make a "form-within-a-form?"

Next... I have no idea how complicated this is going to be. I suppose I could just make little boxes appear beside each control created on the form when it is clicked, for resizing, and make a textbox appear on it when double clicked or something, to change the text in it... Things like this.

So another thing I would like to know is this:
I do have programming experience in C and C++, I've done PHP for a number of years and am starting with Python as of recently. I've generated forms dynamically in VB6. Given this experience, am I in way over my head with this project?

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