[MonoDevelop] General purpose Toolbox and PropertyGrid

[Michael Hutchinson]

On 4/18/06, Lluis Sanchez <lluis at ximian.com> wrote:
<snip>
> For the first goal: I think we can implement in MD a toolbox generic
> enough to be useful for ASP.NET, Stetic or any other designer. I don't

I have started implementing one already that should be generic enough.
The ComponentModel does get involved here, with ToolboxItems wanting a
DesignerHost to create their objects in, but I wrapped them in a more
generic toolbox object. There are also ComponentModel attributes and
other mecthanisms for identifying which designer hosts the items
should be visible for, and we'll need this. My current sticking point
is wondering how best to serialise it to disk. A full XML/
object-based db for all designers' toolbox items could get big, but I
suspect SqlLite would be too heavy.

<snip>
> class PropertyGridPad
> {
>         // To be used by different component models
>         void SetPropertyGridWidget (Gtk.Widget w);
>
>         // To be used by System.ComponentModel users
>         void ShowComponentProperties (object obj);
> }

That's an interesting idea. I'd still like to share grid widgets for
consistency as well as avoiding code duplication, and as I outlined in
my other email I think that should be possible by allowing designers
to push services to the grid. Still, this would be a good short-term
solution and would leave it open for other designers the future that
don't like the generic grid.


Michael