Bee Eee Blog

You’d think getting a combox display into the property grid would be really simple to do since it’s used everywhere in Visual Studio 2008.  And although it isn’t horrible it isn’t exactly straight forward.  I found a couple of dead-ends, poorly explained, or difficult to find the pith of examples.  Finally I ran across this one at http://gaaton.blogspot.com/ It’s nice and concise, easy to understand, and easy to adapt.  I’m going to put in my sample which essentially taken from gaaton.

internal class ProtcolConverter : StringConverter
    {
        public override bool
            GetStandardValuesSupported(
            ITypeDescriptorContext context)
        {
            //True - means show a Combobox
            //and False for show a Modal
            return true;
        }

        public override bool
            GetStandardValuesExclusive(
            ITypeDescriptorContext context)
        {
            //False - a option to edit values
            //and True - set values to state readonly
            return true;
        }

        public override StandardValuesCollection
            GetStandardValues(
            ITypeDescriptorContext context)
        {
            return new StandardValuesCollection(
                new string[] { "net.tcp", "http" });
        }
    }

And finally the we need to attach the string converter to the property by the following.

[TypeConverter(typeof(ProtcolConverter))]
public string ServiceProtocol
{
     get { return MediaServiceConfig.WCFProtocol; }
     set { MediaServiceConfig.WCFProtocol = value; }
}

Enjoy.