Question

Is it possible in WPF to provide an alternate class which should be used as the control to show in the designer instead of the control itself, just like DesignerAttribute does for WinForms?

EDIT:
What I’m looking for is what happens with e.g. the ReportViewer class does. This class has an associated class ReportViewerDesigner which is used in the designer instead of the ReportView class itself.

Answer 1

You can manipulate the Metadata Store; since WPF separates the designer metadata into a separate assembly as noted in the MSDN.

In the System.ComponentModel
framework, a designer type is
associated with its corresponding
component through the
DesignerAttribute metadata attribute.
This means the relationship is
established at compile time, forcing a
hard-coded dependency between the
component’s run-time and design-time
behavior. To attach a different
designer, you must change the
DesignerAttribute declaration and
recompile the component’s code base.

In the WPF Designer, designer metadata
is factored into a separate assembly,
physically decoupling it from the
run-time implementation. This freedom
means that different tools can present
completely different design
experiences for the same run-time
type. For more information, see
Metadata Store.

A concrete example of this is the VS designer versus the Expression Blend designer.

EDIT:

As noted in the comments section they are fundamentally different approaches. It is not a 1:1 by any means; just as is with a WinForms versus WPF approach to building an application. If you are looking for an elusive attribute which will simply use a differing class as the designer representation; it does not exist. There are certainly ways to achieve what you want and allow the designer to display a given control in a myriad of ways but the approach is not like that of WinForms.

• How To: Use the Metadata Store
• WPF Designer Extensibility
  Architecture (look at Designer Instance Creation)