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.

Note

In Visual Studio 2010, you can now also create custom designer experiences for the Silverlight Designer. Although this extensibility documentation references the WPF Designer, in almost all cases, the same concepts, steps, and code can be used in the Silverlight Designer.

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.