Background
One of the main distinguish of Intersoft Components is we provide developers with a unique design-time experience through our Component Editors. Design-time experience has been one of the key development aspect here at Intersoft where run-time features and performance is just as important as the experience during designing.
By emphasizing strongly on this issue, all of our products have an external Component Editor as a complement to standard PropertyGrid in Visual Studio IDE. The component Editor works more and less the same way as the standard Property Grid in the IDE where you can set the currently selected object property. The difference lies in the organization of the property and a convenient layouting where properties with similar interest are then grouped to nodes.
Special Features
The two unique features available in the external Component Editor is what we call by Layout Manager and Structure Manager. Usually when you drag a component from the toolBox, it will have the default appearance and empty structure. Problem occurs when you need to retain the Layout and Structure and apply it to other component, you will need to do a repetitive task to replicate the Layout and Structure.
As a solution to the problem above, by using these 2 features available in our Component Editor, you will have the ability to Serialize the Layout and Structure of the component to XML file(s). The XML file will then be deserialized and applied to the component when the Layout and Structure needs to be used again.
- Layout Manager provides the ability to persist the layouting you have done to the component such as color, style and other things related to the UI appearance of the component. You can later on apply the same appearance to other instance of the same component.
- Structure Manager provides the ability to persist the structure of the component so you can save then load the component structure, this is very useful in cases where you have a complex structure so you can simply load the structure without needing to build the structure from scratch anymore.