Recommended workflow for Custom Controls?

[Martin Anderson (mdtauk)]

I think I know the answer to this question already, but it may be something that is being thought about at a deeper level already...

When creating controls that would be consumed by a Reactor App - do we continue to build them as Templated XAML controls, and Reactor knows how to bubble them up to developers, with all the dependency properties etc as CustomControl developers do now?

Is there some kind of spec or definition file that developers would need to make, to expose properties on these controls?

And if that is the case, is there any thought being done on Reactor native controls, that don't require a traditional style XAML template and resource dictionary - that may open up new rendering and performance possibilities for these controls?

[Chris Anderson (codemonkeychris)]

Right now, exposing a custom control requires you to hand author the handler/exposure to Reactor. here is an example PR: #517

The assumption today is that custom controls would be WinUI/XAML normal controls - if you are creating a custom control, you want the largest audience possible for your control, so you'd want it to be available everywhere.

There are a couple examples of "native" Reactor controls (Charting, DataGrid, PropertyGrid) in the lib, so you can see how those work.

The next question for me - how much would we want to invest in XAML "auto exposure" in Reactor... could we do source generation or some other simpler solution for exposing any XAML control into Reactor. It's pretty simple code, but a lot of boilerplate.

After that, the question is, since Reactor is just creating WinUI elements, there is no reason you can't also take a Reactor component and expose it in a way that makes it show up nicely in a XAML document. We can do the reverse of taking the POCO signature of a Reactor component and create DependencyProps for making XAML work also.

I don't yet have a strong opinion about how much we should invest in these syntax interop... interested to see what people think.