Integrating a custom gui framework with the VS designer

Question

Imagine you homebrew a custom gui framework that doesn't use windows handles (compact framework, so please don't argue with "whys"). One of the main disadvantages of developing such a framework is that you lose compatability with the winform designer.

So my question is to all of you who know a lot about VS customisation, would there be a clever mechanism by which one could incorperate the gui framework into the designer and get it to spit out your custom code instead of the standard windows stuff in the InitialiseComponent() method?

Answer 1

I recently watched a video of these guys who built a WoW AddOn designer for Visual Studio.

They overcame the task of getting their completely custom controls to render correctly in the designer. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you need, but might be worth looking at. It's open-source:

http://www.codeplex.com/WarcraftAddOnStudio

Answer 2

I've also since discovered that DXCore from DevExpress is a tool that simplifies plugin development. The default implementation wouldn't let me dock as document (central) but regardless one can still easily generate a plugin with it that can compile a file on the fly and render the contents of it which may well do the job for me. :)