[MonoDevelop] General purpose Toolbox and PropertyGrid

[Michael Hutchinson]

Hi All,

I've been working on the Toolbox and PropertyGrid I developed for the
ASP.NET Graphical Editor. Due to academic commitments development has
been very slow, so no-one's seen any of the code yet, nor will for a
while! The most obvious change is porting them to GtkTreeView, and the
lack of GInterface support in GTK# has made this quite challenging.

However, I think the most important thing I've been considering is how
these two components will be able to integrate with other designers in
MonoDevelop, particularly Stetic but also anything else that might
appear in the future. The PropertyGrid might also be useful coupled
with the project browser as in Visual Studio.

The main question is: is anyone else interested in a generalised
PropertyGridService and ToolboxService for MonoDevelop? Does anyone
have any ideas how it could fit into the architecture? I'm not very
familiar with MonoDevelop at all, but this appears quite challenging
to me.

In AspNetEdit I use the .NET ComponentModel's ISelectionService and
IComponentChangeService etc to allow the PropertyGrid to respond to
changes of selections automatically and to update when the properties
change value. It registers as a consumer of the events they generate,
and the events are fired by the ASP.NET controls and their designers
and PropertyDescriptors, which acquire a reference to these services
through their ComponentModel containers. As far as I can see, this
model does not map well to Stetic and MonoDevelop.

I think the best solution would be to implement a MonoDevelop
ISelectionService that uses the ComponentModel. This allows us to take
advantage of the property descriptors and visibility, description and
categorisation attributes that already exist. I absolutely rely on
these for AspNetEdit. Stetic would have to pass proxy objects to this
service, wrapping its own functionality, but that's probably easier
than mapping IComponents and their attributes to a completely new
model. I'm happy to get involved on the Stetic side if necessary (and
when I have time).

The toolbox would be a bit easier. Although AspNetEdit's
implementation depends on a ComponentModel Host host, Stetic would
simply have to implement a trivial skeleton host to which created
objects could be added. Or a custom ToolboxItem derived class for GTK#
widgets could call into Stetic directly. Drag-n-drop etc would still
be tricky, but I haven't worked out a reliable way to do that with
Mozilla yet either for anything except plain text.

Something to consider: both of these pads might find a use in the text
editor, especially for ASP.NET pages.

Anyway, I know I've been rambling, but basically I want to hammer out
a design with which everyone will be happy  as I'd like to avoid
duplication of effort on Toolbox-like and ProperyGrid-like widgets.
I'm writing these already for AspNetEdit, and it would be great if
they could become generic MonoDevelop IDE services.


Michael