Igor/10Tec
2022-01-19T16:23:19Z
We would like to inform the developer community that we are actively working on the next big update of iGrid.NET. One of the important improvements in the forthcoming release is the ability to place iGrid on a form in WinForms projects for .NET 6 at design time:

iGrid WinForms .NET 6 Design Time.png

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This became possible due to the WinForms Designer Extensibility SDK distributed as a Nuget package .

iGrid.NET will be available without some advanced design time features like column/row collection editors and visual editors for some properties (for example, the trackbar-based editor for the ScrollBarSettings.Opacity property). These limitations come from the limited support for design time features in the Microsoft WinForms Designer SDK and Visual Studio itself, which is described in greater details in this Microsoft Developer Blogs post:

State of the Windows Forms Designer for .NET Applications 

The missing design-time features will be added to iGrid as they become implemented in the Microsoft development environment. Stay tuned to know when this happens.
Igor/10Tec
2022-03-16T15:51:29Z
iGrid.NET 10.1 with WinForms designer support in projects targeting .NET 6 has been recently released.

As expected, some advanced design-time features are still not available because their basic types in .NET 6 are not implemented by Microsoft yet. However, this does not prevent us from placing the control onto a form, resizing it interactively and changing most of its properties like we can do that in .NET Framework projects.

The missing design-time features will be added as their support appear in the platform SDK.
Turbo07
2024-11-01T15:29:16Z
Was this ever actually implemented?

I bought the 11.0/11.2 control a little over a year ago and quickly became frustrated with it. First of all, despite being advertised as .NET 2.0 compatible out of the box, you actually have to fix bits of the source code for it to even compile. But more importantly, designer support appears to be virtually non-existent (in .NET 4.0 as well as .NET 2.0). When you drag it onto a form, goes down where Visual Studio puts non-visual controls like timers. It completely skips the part where it's supposed to put lines like "MyForm.Controls.Add(MyGrid);" into the form's initialization. When you manually do that, it now shows, but there's virtually no design-time support beyond that.

You can select the control, sometimes (it seems to depend on unselecting the form, so if there are other controls present, it'll select them instead), but there's no indication that it's selected. You can't move it, except with the arrow keys. There's no resizing box so you can't resize it. In the property list, only the most basic types actually (sort of) work - strings, integers, enumerators, etc. More advanced stuff like columns, structures, or exposed controls is a toss up depending on what version of Visual Studio I used. Sometime I get the ellipsis to bring up an editor, sometimes I get the plus sign to expand a structure, usually I just get the class name. The handful of times I got an editor, the changes showed (somewhat) at design time but not run time.

Bizarrely, I downloaded an ancient 3.0 version (2012) and that has far better design-time support. But it's also got numerous bugs, like the scrollbar buttons not actually working, and I haven't put it through any serious use yet.

I bought this because I was getting too deep into the weeds trying to fix the stock DataGrid and DataGridView. For all of the great looking screenshots on the site, I'm pretty disappointed about how it "works" in practice.
Igor/10Tec
2024-11-01T16:01:56Z
Yes, the design time support is present in all versions of iGrid.NET and should work well in the WinForms Designer in .NET Framework projects (don't confuse with the latest .NET Core, i.e. .NET 5/6/7/8/..., that has limited support for WinForms design time services).

The Compatibility page for iGrid.NET contains a sentence regarding the compatibility with .NET Framework 2.0: "iGrid.NET 3.0 is the latest version of iGrid.NET compatible with .NET Framework 2.0". .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 are two different CLR platforms, and that's why we provide only the build for .NET 4.0+ in the demo and retail pack. If we need to clarify all this on our website or somewhere else not to mislead customers, tell us the best way how we can do that.

As for recompiling the latest version of iGrid.NET for .NET Framework, most likely it can be done. If you did that, perhaps, the only thing that you should do correctly to make the design-time support services available for iGrid.NET is to put the design-time DLL into VS's PrivateAssemblies folder. It's not a problem in our implementation - it's just the way VS works.

We can consider your problems as part of our technical support service. You can send us an email describing what you did and what problems you have for further consideration.

FYI: This is not a pertinent forum thread to discuss the problems of the WinForms Designer support in .NET Framework projects. We have another thread dedicated solely to this problem:

https://10tec.com/forum/...hout-installing-the-demo 

We recommend that you read it as it describes what to do with the design-time DLL of iGrid.NET to enable the design time features of iGrid.NET.