Cider part3: Design-time extensibility.

  • Article

We have walked through the cider features, we have discussed its integration with Blend and the sweet spots for each tool ...  to most users that is plenty, but there is a side to Cider that eventhough you might not see a lot is very important for the ecosystem and our long-term vision for Rapid development of WPF apps: the design-time extensibility.

By example, extensibility refers to:

  • Providing hooks (or APIs) so you can check if your code is running inside the designer -- for example at design-time, you might not have access to data that your app expects.. or at design-time you might want your controls to not animate or play video as soon as they are loaded (when at run-time you might want that)..
  • Support for licensing  ( so control vendors can sell you a control that makes your life easier)
  • Support for custom property editors ( say you bought that control from a 3rd party), making it as easy as possible to set the right properties so the control is configured for run-time is obviously a goal of the tool vendor or framework vendor..

For this part, I don't have a screencast or  a write-up because Jim Nakashima recently posted his TechEd session on Designer Extensibility ....  Every thing you need (or more than I know) is covered there and I can't say it any better so let's give him the floor ..

Jim also posted his code samples for the session .

------

This closes the Cider series..  Let me know if I missed some thing that was important to you.