Question

I want to find something similar to the Visual Studio Windows Forms designer. Is there any good implementation of it? I found the following: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=813808
It has basic functionality but, but this is it. For example, you can’t copy objects through clipboard, no context menu support etc.

Links to any other implementation are very appreciated.

Answer 1

OK so if you want a free and/or open source solution then SharpDevelop does it all.
There are however many caveats
1) There is no documentation for this.
2) This is far from trivial.
3) You have to get into the middle of a very complex windows form designer architecture.

I have been working on this for more than 2 days now and there is a lot to learn to just figure out how to use this designer and how it is working. It took me more than two days of unraveling and trying to figue my way through the code and I am still not 100% certaint hat I can do what I want.
If you are going to do this then read

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/cc163871.aspx

http://www.divil.co.uk/net/articles/designers/hosting.asp

This will give you the concepts that you need to work through.

Unless you really want to understand all of this and enjoy the technical challenge then my suggestion would be use one of the commercial designers available.

The best two that I found were

http://runtime-form-designer.qarchive.org/

http://www.greatis.com/dotnet/formdes/

Hope this helps
brett