How to use the Visual Studio form designer for other windowing systems?

Question

I'm creating a windowing system, comparable to WinForms or WPF, in XNA for a game I'm making.

Now, it would be nice to be able to use the Visual Studio form designer to make my windows.

I've googled a bit but I couldn't find anything. However, it might be possible because Microsoft uses the same basic designer interface/structure for many different things. (WinForms designing, WPF designing, Workflow designing, User Control designing, ...)

Is it possible to achieve this with Visual Studio's plugin system or will I have to make something custom to do it?

Answer 1

I don't know how you can use VS, but before starting to make something custom, I would recommend to take a look at http://sharpdevelop.net/opensource/sd/

Answer 2

Well, you must have a lot of programmers in your team if you intend to reprogram something like the Visual Studio forms designer on your own ;-)

In fact, I don't know if it will be possible with the VS plugin system, but if I were in your situation, I would use VS to create a Winforms or WPF GUI, and create a code generator which maps the code generated by VS to the classes of your windowing system. Most likely you will have to restrict yourself in using Winforms/WPF components for which you provide something similar in your framework.

Answer 3

I think it is very complicated things to do but you can do that. At first you have to know about Visual Studio SDK. Usually you have to download separately from the main products. AFAIK CMIIW it is version dependent. So if you are installed VS 2010 with SP1 you have to use VS 2010 SP1 SDK. The other you have to choose that is your products is isolated or integrated shell. The isolated means your shell will launch on separated vs 2010 instance(not in vs 2010). The example is SQL Server management studio from microsoft itself is isolated. Integrated shell means your products will integrated in VS 2010. You can see on MSDN in here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb166441(v=VS.100).aspx how to use that SDK.