I've got an idea for a nice WPF designer extension, but I can't find any information on how to interact with the WPF designer via an extension. Lots of info about the text editor, but none about the WPF designer.
Important note: I'm looking to do this through an extension, like you'd download from the Visual Studio Gallery, rather than from within a control that is added to the design surface.
Looking for any kind of info/links on the subject, thanks.
From what I've seen, Microsoft doesn't really care too much about the WPF support in Visual Studio. They are more focussed on Expression Blend - which is FAR superior for making WPF controls.
A quick google search turned up this tutorial, this may help you get started if you would like to write plugins for it.
The VS WPF Designer has support for 3rd party control extensibility, but almost no support for standard VS extensibility. The Designer lives in its own AppDomain, and you would have to implement your own remoting infrastructure between VS and the WPF Designer in order to support extensions.