I need .NET UI control that acts as a designer/editor window similar to what you see in some of these applications: - Visual Studio - Visio - Balsamiq - Windows Workflow - Photoshop
I hope to use WPF, but will settle for WinForms. I need to create custom widgets that I can drag, drop, and edit in the designer/editor window. I am open to building or buying.
After looking at the common third-party .NET tool providers I cannot find anything.
Ideas?
I think I would tend to go with WPF and rolling my own implementation. In WPF it is comparably easy to build wyswig style editors because you can host anything within anything (e.g. a Button within a drawing) and you can quickly reuse the rendered bitmap of a control or drawing in several palces of your UI (think preview pane etc.) without any perfomance penalty (VisualBrush). I wrote a small editor once myself and made heavy use of adorners - I didn't find it too hard.