Library tutorials & articles
Hosting Windows Forms Designers
The Service Hierarchy
The most fundamental thing to be familiar with on this topic is the service hierarchy. You have already used it, whenever you make a call to
GetService to obtain an instance of ISelectionService or IComponentChangeService. A service hierarchy is made up of several ServiceContainers. A ServiceContainer is used to store an instance of a class that provides a service against its type. So you request a instance by passing it a type, and it comes back with what you need.
When a ServiceContainer is created it is usually bound to a parent. This means that when a service is requested and it isn't in one container, it asks its parent, and then that asks its parent, and so on. ServiceContainers have no concept of children, only of parents. Using the example of the Visual Studio IDE, services are instantiated at several levels. At the document view level you have services such as ISelectionService and IComponentChangedService. These are obviously only relevant to one document (and only the design view, not the code view).
Look at the ITypeResolutionService interface though. Chances are you'll never use it, it's how the designers discover and instantiate types as they deserialize a document. Although the view-level ServiceContainer will get the request for it, it will be the ServiceContainer at the project level that will handle the request. Visual Studio is made up of a hierarchy of servicecontainers, from the toplevel ones that are used internally to manage menus and colours, to the document and view-level ones for editing documents. The image on the right shows a simplified look at part of this gierarchy.
It's very important when hosting designers to get the ServiceContainer hierarchy right - it can make things more logical and therefore more understandable. Always remember that the way everything at design time works together is by getting and using services from the host environment.
Related articles
Related discussion
-
Binary Studio | software development outsourcing Ukraine
by shane124 (4 replies)
-
Chart insertation in a windows form...
by pdhanik (1 replies)
-
Point of Sale Developers: Hardware & C# SDK
by ManiGovindan (7 replies)
-
help with the remote frame buffer protocol from real VNC
by poison (0 replies)
-
Need help making a complete program editable, C# or .net I think
by davelee (1 replies)
Related podcasts
-
A Practical Look at Silverlight 2 Part 1
Now that Silverlight 2 is at the Olympics and making a big splash, we wanted to explore this fascinating technology more. Microsoft Silverlight 2 is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive ap...
Events coming up
-
Nov
18
15 Minutes of Fame
Dresher, United States
This is a yearly tradition. We select 10 of the favorite speakers from monthly meetings, code camps, and hands on labs. Each one does a 15 minute talk on their favorite .NET technology. This is our 10th anniversary so we plan a gala event with special prizes and refreshments.
How would I go about saving a form that I have designed?
I have (am still) modifying this code to create a stand-alone Xaml generator for forms. The Xaml is structured for direct consumption by Windows Presentation Foundation. This was a great starting place.
In the course of my modifications and testing, I found a couple of bugs in the code which you may wish to correct in your source.
The Name property is listed twice in the property grid.
If you add a control (i.e. a Button), then change the name from the default (Button1) to anything else, then add another button, you get an unhandled exception. This does not occur if all like controls are added first then the names are modified. The cause is when the control is first added to the designer, it is added to the DesignerHost components collection using the default (Button1) control name as a key. When the Name property is updated, the components collection is not. When adding a second like control, the DesignerHost attempts to add it using the default name as well. However, since the first control was renamed, the default name of the second control is the same as it was for the first (Button1). An unhandled exception is thrown when the second control is added because the components collection already contains a control with the same key value.
I corrected this by attaching a handler to the PropertyValueChanged event of the PropertyGrid which removes the original entry for the control and readds it with the new name as the key whenever the Name property value is changed.
how to change Designer for design PocketPC components?
htx
v!tek
Hi Tim, great article. I am currently creating a designer in a similar manner to your article, used to create pdf files. I am using it to add only textboxes and pictures, and can save the data to a database. However I need to bring back the objects and add them to the form programmatically so the user can edit the objects (change the positions etc) Do you know how (or explain how) to add items to the designer surface programmatcally without using the drag and drop from the toolbox
Thanks
John Harry
Tim:
Thanks for your nice article.
How can I get the location of a control in the design surface. I want to show the coordinates when the user moves the control, but I can't figure how!
Did you figure it out how to persist the designer content? I would appreciate any help on this
Thanks
Sgirase
Hi!
That article is really great. It gave me useful hints to start my application in perfectmanner , which looks like an .Net IDE . but can you please tell me how to remove a control from the designer form ....
Hello Tim,
Thank you very much for this excellent article.
We have developed a graphical macro language in C# for our customers and one of the remaining hurdles that we have is the ability to edit the location of controls on a runtime form.
When the customer wants to edit our form, we scan our macro and generate controls on the form based upon the macro content.
We would then like to display that form with the controls where the customer can position and size those controls like you can in this Designer example. We would then iterate through the list of controls and remember their locations and sizes within the macro.
Can you please lead us in the right direction? We have been searching, trying, and reading many examples to no avail. It appears that you possess this knowledge and could help us. We are not inexperienced developers, I personally have been a software developer for 22 years in many languages.
For example, how would you modify this example so that controls can be placed on the form with out the user clicking on the designer surface?
Thank you very much for your reply,
Rick Wirch
Good question ... I am actually tasked with building a Web Forms Designer. I can load ASP.NET controls into my toolbox but of course can't drop those controls onto a Windows forms. Can somebody help me!!
Much appreciated -
Jon
Is it possible to use a treeview for that?
That article is really great.
It gave me the needed hints to step into this subject as deep as I wanted to. As i'm currently trying tom write a lightweight IDE for customumizing my own applications, i need to know, how the content auf the designer could be persisted and reloaded.
Is there any standard-mechanism for that, or will I have to implement my own handlers?
Any help would be appreciated!
Its possible to do something similar to your example using web forms designer?
This article is simply great. I wish to see more like this one.
Arthur
This thread is for discussions of Hosting Windows Forms Designers.