This is a roundup for the AGT project: what have we done so far?

If you’re just joining me, I always put the following text at the beginning of each article in the series I’m currently working on:

The AGT (Argentum Tela) series of articles is an effort to do two things.  Usually an idea is presented only in its finished form.  The first goal is to do some Reality Blogging, to show an idea evolve over time without pulling any punches.  The second goal, and the example vehicle for the evolution aspect, is an extensible Design Surface for Silverlight similar to what we have in Visual Studio 2008.   This type of application has all sorts of interesting uses.  My example is a Home Theater layout tool.

What I'm working on here is a framwork I can use to build something that looks and behaves like a Visual Studio Shell or a Visio, but runs inside the browser using Silverlight.  I of course won’t claim to have duplicated the functionality in those tools, which is massive.  Rather, I’m going for the “80/20” rule; I’m hoping that I can achieve huge amounts of functionality for very little work with an implementation that is understandable yet flexible.  I plan on putting this on Codeplex once I get to a decent v1 milestone. 

Summary of the ground covered so far:

·         AGT[0] – Vision statement

·         AGT[1] – Initial thoughts on Service/plug-in/add-in/module strategy and Composite UI management

·         AGT[2] – Dependency injection, Presenters, Event Aggregation

·         AGT[3] – Creating the initial designer metaphors

·         AGT[4] – Toolbox service, ViewModel, Data binding with INotifyCollectionChanged

·         AGT[5] – Generating dynamic proxies for Service providers using Reflection Emit

·         AGT[6] – Creating a design for drag/drop interactions in Silverlight.

·         AGT[7] – Implementing drag ‘n drop from the Toolbox to the Design surface

·         AGT[8] – Code refactoring and introduction of Unit Tests for Silverlight

·         AGT[9] – Visual refactoring, new Toolbox items

·         AGT[10] – Creating a Selection service, publish live demo

·         AGT[11] – Updating the codebase for Silverlight 2 RC0

·         AGT[12] – Resizing items on the designer surface

This is Reality Blogging, I really am writing the code as I go.  Some of the embarrassing refactoring should serve as proof of this.  Still, it’s completely fair to think about a roadmap and potential problems.  I do have an idea of where all this is going and what might constitute a reasonable v1 release.  Here are some additional things I'd like to support.

1.       Multi-select items by drawing a rectangle “lasso” on the surface

2.       Moving  the selected stuff around on the surface with the mouse and keyboard

3.       Property Editing contract: When an IDesignableControl is selected, how will I determine what properties show up in my “property grid” and how they look?

4.       Property editing grid: with the above decided, a PropertyGrid will have to be built from scratch!

5.       Supporting Silverlight 2’s Full Screen mode

6.       Support zoom in/zoom out at the document level

7.       Change the look of the designer using some kind of Settings service.

8.       Design Surface Behavior concepts:  I have this idea that I might provide flexibility as to how things look and behave on the Designer Surface using a “behavior chain”, which I envision will function as a set of mini-Services hosted by the Design Surface itself. I thought of some things I might do to prove the design works:

a.       Alignment snap-lines ala Visual Studio?

b.      Rotate “adorner” to allow things to be rotated?

c.       Measure adorner to selected items show a “size”?

d.      Refactor multi-select to be a behavior of this type?

9.       Serialization/IDesignableControl<T>: In order to be useful, my “drawings” will need to be saved and re-loaded into the designer!  I need to serialize the scene graph into some kind of "document".

10.   Hierarchy of service containers via some notion of Context.  Stay tuned for explanation on this one…

11.   “Stencil” sets: how to provide drop-in flexibility for “what kind of document is this?”

12.   Dedicated refactoring articles as I go.

If I am correct and these things can mostly be done in one article each, I might be up to something like AGT[30] before I’m ready to put this on Codeplex as an v1 release. I'm excited about what's to come, but I only have so much time for research so I will take each step as I can.