Creating a Custom Design-Time Environment
- by Charlie
Hello all,
My question is related to the design-time support of WPF. From MSDN I read,
The WPF Designer provides a framework
and a public API which you can use to
implement custom adorners, tools,
property editors, and designers.
But the vast majority of the examples I have found are trivial, and do not illustrate much concerning the creation of a customized designer in an existing WPF application. We have migrated our application from Windows Forms to WPF over the past year, and the next step will be to take an existing WinForms Panel designer, and rewrite it in WPF.
Suffice it to say that this will be a huge project. But I don't even know where to begin. I am wondering if any of you have had similar experiences writing a customized designer for a WPF application, and what it was like. Even better, if you could compare and contrast the functionality between the WinForms designer and the WPF designer, or explain the transition from the former to the latter, that would be helpful. If you know of any simple examples that demonstrate a customized design environment (with custom controls, etc.) that would be extremely beneficial.
All in all, I am just wondering if many people have undertaken this yet, and what their results have been.
EDIT: To clarify, yes, I am talking about hosting a WPF designer. It appears that this may not even be possible, which is a huge setback. Here is a screenshot of our current WinForms designer. As you can see, it is used to create customized user interfaces. You can drag custom controls onto it and design them, then put the panel into a "run mode" in which all of the controls become functional.
Short of spending months writing our designer, would this be possible in WPF? What about .NET 4.0 and VS2010? Will those add any designer functionality?
