WPF Designer Extensibility

You can create your own custom designer experiences for the WPF Designer for Visual Studio. The WPF Designer provides a framework and a public API which you can use to implement custom adorners, tools, property editors, and designers. For a collection of full sample solutions, see the WPF and Silverlight Designer Extensibility Samples site.

In This Section

• Extensibility Changes in Visual Studio 2010
  Describes the changes in the WPF Designer Extensibility API for Visual Studio 2010 since its initial release in Visual Studio 2008.

• WPF Designer Extensibility Architecture
  Describes the overall architecture of the WPF Designer extensibility framework.

• Understanding WPF Designer Extensibility
  Topics that describe how to create your own custom designer experiences for the WPF Designer.

• Basic Extensibility Concepts
  Contains topics that describe how to perform basic extensibility tasks, such as creating custom menu actions.

• Creating Custom Adorners
  Contains topics that describe how to create custom adorners, such as rails.

• Creating Custom Editors
  Contains topics that describe how to create custom editors, such as color editors.

• Design Time versus Run Time Behavior
  Contains topics that describe how to implement custom design-time logic.

• Advanced Extensibility Concepts
  Contains topics that describe how to perform advanced extensibility tasks, such as creating surrogate policies.

• WPF Designer Extensibility Reference
  Describes the extensibility reference API for the WPF Designer.

Reference

• AdornerPanel
  Provides a container for WPF controls, which are used at design time as adorners.

• AdornerProvider
  A feature provider that you can add to a class to automatically add adorners to the designer surface.

• EditingContext
  Contains contextual state about a designer.

• ModelItem
  Represents a single item in the editing model.

• ModelService
  The main entry point the designer uses to obtain the model.

• ModelFactory
  Creates instances of items in the designer.

• FeatureProvider
  Adds a class-specific contribution to a feature.

• FeatureConnectorAttribute
  Contains the type of FeatureConnector<TFeatureProviderType> required to handle a FeatureProvider

• FeatureManager
  Manages feature providers and feature connectors.

• AttributeTableBuilder
  Creates an attribute table that can be passed to the metadata store.

• PropertyValue
  Provides a data model for an underlying common language runtime (CLR) property value.

• PropertyValueEditor
  Container for inline editor logic for properties.

• Task
  A collection of commands and input bindings to those commands.

• Tool
  Determines the mode of the designer.

Related Sections

• Troubleshooting WPF and Silverlight Designer Load Failures
  Describes procedures for understanding unexpected behavior in your custom designer code.

• Using WPF Controls
  Contains links that describe how to use WPF controls in Windows Forms.

• Migration and Interoperability
  Describes interoperation between the WPF and Windows Forms technologies.