How does WebMatrix work?
 

Hi Folks

I am trying to design a GUI builder tool with a design 'canvas' for placing
web controls and setting their properties. Users will be able to piece
together simple web applications by pointing and clicking - they won't need
to be programmers as I will provide a selection of standard behaviours to
bind with the controls' events.

I have not decided whether my tool will be developed using Visual Studio
..NET 2003 or the Whidbey release.

My question is: how does WebMatrix (which is only a 1Mb download!) provide
such a rich UI for designing web pages? Is it using classes inside the .NET
framework to actually create the design surface, positioning and sizing
handles, toolbars and property windows etc. and if so what are those classes
and where are they documented?

I have used the ILDASM program to look inside the file Microsoft.Matrix.dll,
which is part of the WebMatrix package, and it implements a number of
framework classes such as IDocumentDesignerHost and ILayeredDesignerHost,
which look relevant.

Looking at the Whidbey framework there are some new classes such as the
DesignSurface class. Because the documentation is very sparse I'm not sure
whether this is relevant or not?

Any help gratefully received.

Thanks in advance

Mark