Components for WPF similar to the simplified Visual Studio

Question

I would like to make a support plug-ins in my program. For example in my program there are several tabs in one tab is the editor in which the code is written also in that tab has a button run. After pressing the button run occurs a compilation of source code and its execution. The results of work are displayed in the other tab. I would like to find such a component in which there are: Syntax Highlighting, Debugger, Analogue of solution explorer

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Thank you very much for your answers. I would like to bring more of clarity to my question. I want to do something similar to that is shown in the screenshots below

On a single tab there is the editor and at the other tab displays the results. To write plug-ins I'd like to use C #.

Answer 1

I guess the best place to start is AvalonDock from CodePlex, specifically what you are trying to do is a Tabbed User Interface.

Keep in mind that even with a TabbedWindows framework build/debug and syntax highlighting are not for free and you will have to find icons and design the UI mostly yourself.

for code coloring there are also many components, also free, like Scintilla .NET

Answer 2

You obviously understand that Visual Studio is a very complex application, so rewriting portions of it will be difficult. There are components available to help you, like the ICSharpCode text editor. In fact, that whole project is probably quite valuable.

However, when thinking of plugins and actually writing code for it, I'd personally go down the MEF route. In fact, this is the very framework that VS.NET 2010 uses for extensibility. Provide your user/developer with a set of libraries to code against (like an SDK), and let them use a Visual Studio Express edition to write proper code :)

Answer 3

As source code editor you can use AvalonEdit (it is great, in some aspects even better than VS code editor), solution explorer is fairly easy to create and debugger is way too language-specific to be a reusable component (you didn't specify what language are you developing for!).

The whole thing can be packaged into AvalonDock, so you get the draggable and dockable panels - it even has VS 2010-like skin (and again - is very easy to implement even with only very basic WPF knowledge).

Or you can use the Visual Studio Isolated Shell - it allows you to use the Visual Studio interface in your program (the end users don't have to have VS installed!), but it requires extensive knowledge of VS API (if you ever developed VS extension you know what I am talking about). For example Civilization V used this approach for it's modding environment, but the result smells as stripped VS with custom splash screen, not as professional product. There are many buttons and config. options that don't work, some features that would be expected from such program (and easy to do in custom app) didn't get in because it would be nigh impossible to implant them into the VSIS etc...

EDIT: You may also eventually be interested in this.