Hosting WPF Designer

I'm starting to design an architecture for a scada program. One of the main issues in the design is which presentation technique to use: Windows Forms or Avalon, oops WPF.

When we are going to use the Windows Forms we can use some .net classes to host a window forms designer. The user can add or remove components (like tanks, pipes, ...).

But why not use WPF instead of Windows Forms It sure looks nice. But it seems that when we are going to use WPF, we have to develop our own designer framework from scratch. I would like to know if there are some classes for hosting your own WPF designer. Or is there any documentation on how to architecture a design framework using WPF

Thanks in advance.

Visual Studio 200834

I am interested that if there is a designer control could help you. For example : you can host this control in your application, and in this control user can drag a symbol(e.g. a tank, a pipe, ...) into the design surface, input the property value of the tank or the pipe. etc.

Is such control useful

Thanks!

The designer for WPF is Cider. Please see the following links for more information:

WPF Designer ("Cider") MSDN Forum
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx ForumID=169&SiteID=1

Cider Wiki
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Cider.HomePage

Introducing "Cider": The Visual Studio Designer for WPF
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx xml=episodes/en/20051020CiderMB/manifest.xml

Sneak Peak at Cider
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx postid=129619

Back to your question: The Windows Forms designer supports hosting outside of Visual Studio and is quite easy to do with VS 2005 (Whidbey). It will provide much of (if not all of) the functionality you are looking for.

In terms of hosting the Cider designer, this is one of the experiences that we are considering for our v1 in the Visual Studio Orcas time frame. We are working through licensing issues and resource limitations.

I too hope that you will provide support for hosting the Cider designer in end user applications outside of Visual Studio.

Has any more consideration been given to hosting the Cider designer outside of Visual Studio In what timeframe would this be available

The Aurora XAML Designer was developed explicitly for this purpose.....embedding in 3rd party apps....

http://www.mobiform.com/products/Aurora/aurora.htm

Ron