Creating a UI Designer

I'd like to create a UI designer using Silverlight, WPF, or Win开发者_开发问答Forms for a custom system. What's the best way to go around this?

What namespaces, sdks, etc should I be aware of?

I suggest you check out sharpdevelop http://www.icsharpcode.net/opensource/sd/ It already has an open source implementation of gui designers (for winforms and wpf at least).

I am also working on a similar project and we have used canvas as designer surface; as done in this CodeProject article -

WPF Diagram Designer - Part 4 http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/WPFDiagramDesigner_Part4.aspx

One more project based on this can be found at codeplex-

http://simulo.codeplex.com/

One more option is to use .Net DesignSurface that provides the design-time infrastructure at runtime as mentioned in this question -

How to create an UI Designer utility?

Link there is not working, correct link to code project article is -

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/DesignSurfaceManager_Ext.aspx

One more approach mentioned here is to use Visual Studio Shell(VS 2010), but I am not sure how useful it is.