I want to create a window baseclass that contains 3 elements:

- a ribbon control (ie devcomponents wpf ribbon)
- a region to contain child form controls
- a statusbar

This way, all windows that inherit from this window will automatically provide these controls (and soms functions).

I created a lookless windowbase.cs file that adds a 3-row grid to the window in the constructor containing a ribbon in row 0 and a statusbar in row 2.

2 problems arrise when using this strategy:

1/ The child form does not show any inherited controls during design time. This is a lesser problem, since the ribbon control and status bar can be modified from code-behind in the constructor.

2/ After adding controls to the child window, the xaml cannot be parsed anymore.
I guess a need to add something like a contencontrol, to be added to row 1 from the code behind, but previous attempts all led to a inparsable xaml file.

Am I missing something obvious here?
Visual inheritance is pretty basic in winforms, but I guess this work-around should be possible too…

Need to create an excel template that everytime it’s opened, it increment a number in the excel spreadsheet.
The idea is everytime a file is create from the template, it gets a unique number.
Also do you think it possible to use this unique number as the name of the file to be save.
For example, first file from template would be called 101.xls, second file from template would be called 102.xls.
Not sure if I should use some kind of script to do the latter part?

thanks in advance
Paul