WPF Designer Extensibility

Visual Studio 2010

.NET Framework 3.5

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.