Is this provided as a class in .NET?

[mutant]

Is the form designer provided as a class or some interface in .NET? Im asking cause it would be hard for me to belive that the guys from http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ could build one that looks excatly the same as the one in VS.NET.

 

[Volte]

Believe it. If you have a very good understanding of Windows Forms
and the .NET framework, a form designer is not hard. divil, resident
moderator here, has created his own version of the IDE with a
windows forms designer much like the one built into VS.NET.

The only part provided with the framework is the property grid,
which is provided with VS.NET. Just look in the components
menu.

 

[mutant]

Well if thats the case, power to them and Divil!

I wish I could do that so I could finally have a C++ form designer (its so sad that new VS.NET comes only with a designer for managed C++)

 

[Divil]

I spent most of last week working on my forms designer that VolteFace spoke of. Its coming along well, and I hope to be able to upload a demo version at some point soon.

Most the designer stuff you see in VS.NET comes from the framework itself, along with the serializers that turn a designed form (or usercontrol, or whatever) in to code. You just have to write an awful lot of your own code to glue them all together and make them work properly.

To make them work with raw C++ would be extremely difficult since theyre geared for .NET. You would have to rewrite the serializers from scratch, and components that need custom serializers simply wouldnt work at all.

 

[mutant]

I dont need anything to make the code for the form for me afterwards the control is put on form or anything, I can do that myself so that wouldnt be much of a problem if I understand correctly what you said.

 

[Divil]

You have an awful lot of work ahead of you. Getting the form designers to come alive is by no means a trivial task, and youll need to implement at least a dozen interfaces before it works even close to reliably

 

[mutant]

Well, you just made me very encouraged and confident about doing this