AlterNET Form Designer is a component library providing a quick and convenient way for creating visual user interfaces. It allows placing controls to the design surfaces, setting their initial properties and writing event handlers for their events.
Form Designer can be used as a standalone component library or as part of Extensibility Studio solution.
This control provides design surface allowing to add controls to a form, arrange them, and write code for their events.
It supports all common editing operations, such as dragging, selecting, copying and deleting components and controls, changing their size and z-order, and undoing any of these operations.
A visual control that displays components and controls that you can drag to the Form Designer surface.
It is comprised of a set of foldable tabs helping to organize controls by categories and allowing to specify which components and controls, including third-party controls, appear on the toolbox.
A visual control allowing to view and change the design-time properties and assign event handlers for the controls or components that are being selected in the Form Designer.
It displays different types of editing fields, such as edit boxes, drop-down lists and check boxes depending on the type of the property.
WinForms Form designer can save its content to C# or VB code, while WPF designer uses XAML format instead.
Specific resources, such as images, can be serialized to the form or project resource files.
Form Designer comes in the form of two distinct versions for designing forms for WinForms and WPF applications. WinForms and WPF designers use different approaches for designing visual interfaces, serializing design content and running forms that are being designed.
Documentation and user guide provide comprehensive information on the Form Designer product and Demonstrations, while Quick Start Guide projects are designed to explain how to use Form Designer's features.
WPF's version of Form Designer and Property Grid controls is based on the modified sources of the open-source SharpDevelop project.
Form Designer is written in C# and built on .NET Framework. Universal edition ships with the full source code, including source code for demo projects and design-time code.
In Form Designer, you can use the mouse to drag controls, which are components with visual representations, such as buttons and text boxes, onto a design surface.
Form Designer supports all standard form editing operations with controls, such as selecting, copying, pasting, moving, resizing, matching the functionality of Microsoft Visual Studio Form Designer.
WinForms Form Designer can save its content to C# or VB source code, while WPF Form Designer uses XAML format instead.
Along with the user-defined code for event handlers, this form can be compiled into a standalone executable and run.
Once you add a control to the design surface, you can use the Properties window to set its properties, such as font or text.
The values you specify in the Properties window are getting serialized in the C#, VB code or XAML and will be assigned to that property when the control is created at run time.
You can use the Properties window to specify which events you want to handle in your code by clicking on the Events button.
When you add an event handler through the Properties window, the designer automatically writes the empty method body. The most common example is handling a button's Click event.