Are there frameworks or customizable tools to make a visual editor for my .NET app?

Question

Hi

I have an application, which performs some custom data gathering, transformation and reporting.

Currently, the only way to set up and configure all the steps is to fill some large and cumbersome WinForms screens. What I'd like to do is to make a lightweight and user-friendly visual editor, where "blocks" will show data sources, data transformation modules and visualizers and "arrows" will show the data flow...

Kind of, you know, like in SQL Server or Access you can edit SQL query text directly or through a visual editor, which might not be perfect in ALL cases, but works fine in, probably, 99% of real-life user scenarios.

And so the question is can you name a free framework or toolkit, which can help me in the GUI part of the problem? So that I don't need to write the editor, only provide the business logic behind the "blocks" and the "arrows", related to my particualr app.

Or maybe it is easily doable in WPF?

Answer 1

If it's ok that the users of your tool will have to have Visual Studio Standard or higher, then look into the DSL Toolkit. It allows you to create a graphical editor for creating instances of a domain model. These instances may be used as-is, or may be used to generate code or other text-based artifacts in Visual Studio.

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I just realized you don't need VS. There are examples of hosting the generated designer as a Windows Forms control in your favorite Windows Forms application. The result would be a control that returns an instance of the domain model. You could do whatever you wanted to do with that instance.