Creating a Custom Silverlight Designer in WPF

Question

I need to create a designer for Silverlight in WPF and I’m thinking of a few options

1. Use a WebBrowser control, display the content there and communicate Silverlight using the JavaScript Bridge. Not sure if this will be enough for the scenarios I need to support (see below). This is what KaXaml is doing. SilverlightSpy uses a a more sophisticated WebBrowser control, but I'm not sure how they communicate with Silverlight.
2. Communicate using Sockets between the Host and Silverlight.
3. Host the Silverlight runtime (not in a browser), but directly using AgCore.dll. Similar to what sllauncher does for OOB. I imagine this is what Blend/VS are doing.
4. Do whatever Blend or VS are doing which.

I obviously don’t want to go as far as VS and Blend, but I need to support drag and drop of some controls as well as grouping, changing the layout, moving controls in the design surface and obviously updating the Xaml as a result of this actions.

Any ideas, recommendations or pointers on the best way to create a Silverlight Designer in WPF?

Answer 1

SharpDevelop 4 has a WPF based editor for WPF and Silverlight -> http://www.icsharpcode.net/opensource/sd/