It's an idea I have. but a VS IDE add-in might do the trick as well.
What it boils down to is a way that forms (or usercontrols) can be "designed," i.e., drawn out with controls and an area for descriptive comments. This would allow design meeting sessions to design winform interfaces without using the full VS control set, writing code to provide functionality, but allow an interface "design" to be quickly built for approval. These don't even have to be explicitly detailed, but when the form is printed, the comments and descriptions can be included along with it. This would create a "slide-show" (for lack of a better term) that would show the form and comments. Since the IDE was designed for "drawing and designing" forms as such, it stands to reason that when we have meetings for laying out "screens," why not use the IDE? I've used Viso and PowerPoint for these operations and neither one really does the trick. Both have limitations that the VS IDE surpasses on. Both are time consuming and lacking in many features that the VS IDE excels at. My original thought was to create a "designer" that incorporated some of these aspects, such as printing directly from the designer itself. Yes, I would welcome comments or suggestions on the subject. As far as designers go, Microsoft should make the designer implementation easier and/or provide clear samples for creating them rather than it being a nightmare of a task to discover the information. Thanks, Mike On 6/28/06, J. Merrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hopefully you won't think I'm trying to get you to make proprietary information public, but the amount of work you'd need to do in order to create an add-in for VS is so much less than building from scratch, I'd encourage you to indicate what you're thinking of so others can comment on the difficulty of creating an add-in (vs a new designer). Note that you would have a very large market if you made a VS add-in, but a rather small one if you were suggesting to people that they use a different designer than the one that's built into VS. There is quite a bit of add-in-creation assistance available if you use the DXCore code available for free from <http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/NET/DXCore/> http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/NET/DXCore/ However, if you're thinking of building something commercial, you might not want to use DXCore -- except perhaps to prove to yourself that your idea is in fact useful. At 09:00 AM 6/28/2006, Mike Andrews wrote >Guys, > >I have an idea for a new type of form designer. Essentially the same form >designer with an added ability. >I can't seem to find anything useful on creating a designer either from >scratch, or inheriting an existing designer and making use of it. > >Do any of you any any suggestions for where to look or how to do it? > >Thanks, >Mike J. Merrill / Analytical Software Corp =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentor(r) http://www.develop.com View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
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