Understanding 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 Designer Extensibility Samples site.

In This Section

• Providing Design-time Metadata
  Describes how to provide design-time metadata in separate assemblies.

• Deploying a Custom Control and Design-time Assemblies
  Describes how to deploy design-time assemblies for your custom control's runtime assembly.

• Adorner Architecture
  Describes the framework for adorners, which are special glyphs on the design surface.

• Editing Context Architecture
  Describes the framework for controlling and interacting with designer state.

• Editing Model Architecture
  Describes the framework for interacting with editable objects, which are wrappers around the WPF runtime controls.

• Feature Providers and Feature Connectors
  Describes the framework for extending the design-time by using the FeatureProvider and FeatureConnector<TFeatureProviderType> types.

• Property Editing Architecture
  Describes the framework for interacting with the visual property editing system.

• Tool Architecture
  Describes the framework for implementing tool support, which consists of commands, tasks, and tools.

• User Input and Presentation Architecture
  Describes the mechanism for handling user input.

• XAML Parser Architecture
  Describes the framework for parsing XAML at design time.

• Comparing the Windows Forms Designer Framework to the WPF Designer Framework
  Describes similarities and differences between the Windows Forms Designer and the WPF Designer extensibility framework.

Related Sections

• WPF Designer Extensibility Reference
  This section has the extensibility reference API for the WPF Designer to implement custom adorners, tools, property editors, and designers.