Sharepoint Designer/ Expression Web Designer : adding item in toolbox ?

[Steve B.]

Hi

As we ship some controls with one of our application that targets web
designers, we want to add items in the toolbox of the two products.

With VS 2005, it is quite easy, but what about this two products ?

We was able to add our controls in the standards group, by modifying the
standard.xml file located in Program Files\Office12\1033, but this looks
like much a trick than a supported operation.

I'd appreciate any help,
Steve

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

You can make the third party controls render in EW or SD, but you cannot add
them to the toolbox, as the list is hard coded. Dumb? Perhaps, but I give
the benefit of the doubt they never saw people using their hammer to beat in
screws. End users often take a product beyond where it was designed to go.

To render the third party controls, place them in the GAC. Perhaps the next
version will allow you do actually place them in the toolbox.

 

[Steve B.]

Actually, we provide to our customer a CMS like application and we want to
let them use the web designer or their choice.
The application clearly separate web designers from developpers. We can't
ask web designer to use Visual Studio (but we allow it of course), even if
VS can be greatly customized.

Controls assemblies are installed in GAC by the SDK setup and render
correctly in the designer (with the property grid editable as required). The
only lack is that web designer must add by hand the html tag of our control,
which is not as simple as what we want to achieve.
So what our options ?

Thanks
Steve

 

[md Webs Unlimited]

Your option is to create a EW add-in to insert the code into the page for
the user.


--
Mike - FrontPage MVP '97 - '02
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[Cheryl D Wise]

To elaborate on Mike's answer create an add-in write its own toolbar or add
to a menu. The Toolbox is not currently extensible and adding extensibility
to the toolbox was not on the version 2 feature list presented at Mix 07.
They did say they hare not looked down version 2 yet. They were actively
soliciting requests for future version features at Mix. See the Expression
Web recording over at http://sessions.visitmix.com for more info