I’ve decided to start work on a piece of software which will be useful within the industry I work in. I don’t want to go into too much detail about what the application will be for but thought it would be useful to others if I blog about various parts of the experience as I work on it.
One of the things my application will require is the ability for users to create their own interfaces by adding text boxes and buttons to a design surface, in a similar way to Visual Studio 2005/2008 and storing these “screen layouts” in a database, providing a basic development environment to customize the application to the users requirements. The actual controls that they will move around to create their layouts do not have to be functional controls, but “positioners” for where controls will appear during application use and as such will probably end up being custom user controls rather than real buttons and text boxes for instance.
This evening I thought I would look into how to drag and drop controls around a form using real buttons for now, the example should work for any type of control. I will try to post my learnings in tutorial format so that anyone should be able to follow them. Continue reading »