The UI is
part of the control, not the development environment.
The .NET Framework provides rich design-time support, and Visual Studio 2008 provides
rich extensibility points for tools as well as component vendors built on top of the .NET Framework.
There are two primary facilities available for design-time programming:
??? Design-time environment services
??? Component-specific customizations
We next provide an overview of design-time environment services, and then we move on
to cover component customization. As we implement component customization samples, we
touch on the design-time environment services necessary to integrate into a design-time environment
such as Visual Studio.
Environment Services Overview
The .NET Framework design-time environment services extend the capabilities and level of
integration with a designer tool such as Visual Studio. To obtain a service, the Component class
implements IServiceProvider, which has a method named GetService that can be used to
obtain a reference to a service interface implemented by the design-time environment.
For example, a server control can use the GetService method in a UI type editor to obtain
a reference to IWindowsFormsEditorService. Next, the control can call the ShowDialog method
on the reference to have the design-time environment create a Windows Forms??“based UI for
editing a particular property.
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