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Some years ago I tried programming in C# and at the time it seemed to offer a flexible way to construct user interfaces. For instance there was an editor for creating UIs. I just downloaded Visual Studio Express 2013 and it seems to have completely changed. There is no UI editor anywhere that I can see, and there is a strange XAML file that is not documented anywhere obvious, and there are no sample programs from Microsoft that seem to be compatible with Visual Studio Express 2013. How can I create a UI and control its appearance down to the pixel? Or is that no longer allowed? Should I contemplate skipping Visual Studio Express entirely and just build with a Makefile? Thanks.

user3342627
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    Is this a joke?? `is not documented anywhere obvious` REALLY? What about the most obvious place - MSDN? – walther Mar 11 '14 at 02:11

2 Answers2

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Professional Windows UIs are not created using drag and drop techniques.

  • What you used back in time is called "winforms". It is a really old technology that is not intended to create rich, highly interactive UIs. And no, it is nowhere near "flexible". It doesn't allow any kind of customization and it forces you to either use the default, ugly stuff, or resort to an endless hell of horrible hacks in order to customize anything. It exhibits a "do less with more code", procedural type of approach as opposed to the "do more with less", declarative beauty you find in XAML-based technologies. It is not recommended for any new projects, only to maintain legacy applications.

  • If you're serious about Windows UI design, you need to learn XAML and use any of the XAML-based technologies such as WPF or WinRT.

  • If you're serious about application structure and correctly architecting the different layers of a Windows application, you need to learn MVVM and DataBinding.

  • If you want to create a completely custom UI, you need to create custom Styles and Templates for your controls. You can use Expression Blend if you want, or create these in pure hand-written XAML.

  • There is abundant documentation on all these subjects, both on MSDN and in non-official sources (such as StackOverflow). Refer to all the linked sources in this answer.

  • If you still prefer a drag and drop approach to create Windows UIs, you can do so using the Visual Studio Designer for XAML-based UIs, however be aware that this approach has an important number of drawbacks: Drawbacks of using the Visual Studio designer drag and drop approach to create XAML-Based UIs.

Community
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Federico Berasategui
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I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about, but there are two separate UI frameworks within Visual Studio and C#. Winforms, which you probably used some years ago, and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which is a much newer technology that uses XAML markup to define your interface.

Both provide a visual editor in Visual Studio by clicking the .cs (for WinForms) or .xaml (for WPF) file. When creating a project please confirm which of the two you selected.

Also I'd like to note that Visual Studio defaults to opening the visual UI editor when you select and create either of these types of projects.

If you'd like to learn about the latter technology (WPF) please see here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970268(v=vs.110).aspx

caesay
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