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Problem

In my installation of Visual Studio 2022 the XAML Designer doesn't show up after opening MainWindow.xaml.

Specs

  • Windows 11
  • Visual Studio 2022
  • Use case: Desktop, C#, WinUI 3, MSIX packaged

Question

Is there anything i missed or is the XAML Designer completely vanished from Visual Studio?

Description

At first i followed the instructions of Microsoft:

  1. Install tools for the Windows App SDK (learn.microsoft.com)
  2. Create your first WinUI 3 (Windows App SDK) project (learn.microsoft.com)

The installation of VS went totally fine. I am able to follow the whole instruction.

But i am new to Visual Studio. I didn't use it since Version 2013. So i am used to have a visual designer (back then i did Windows Forms and WPF). I already found and tested the Hot Reload feature. But it can't be the solution. I just want to design my app before debugging it. Keeping the app alive only for changing UI elements seems to be very energy intense and in general not the right way.

Second
Create a UI by using XAML Designer (learn.microsoft.com)

In the instruction above i saw the buttons for switching between code and design. But they aren't available in my XAML window.

Lastly i tried Open with. Indeed i was able to choose XAML-Designer or XAML-Designer with coding. But nothing happened. The XAML Designer didn't show up.

Andrew KeepCoding
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blueblob
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  • There is no designer for WinUI 3 (for the moment?). There's a ongoing discussion in the GitHub [repo](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70292470/where-is-the-designer-view-in-winui-3). – Andrew KeepCoding Aug 16 '22 at 00:11
  • @AndrewKeepCoding Thanks. At least it tells me that i'm not crazy and that my computer is working fine. I was really hoping for WinUI3 to be the next thing after WinForms. They promoted it so that i wanted to try it out. They have this very fancy Gallery App and the UI really is more responsive and better designed than Windows Forms. But without a preview or design tool the visual draft part gets very hard. I guess i'll wait for announcements And for the meantime i feel like developing a website, with every 20 seconds rebuild or hot reload the application to see changes of the UI. – blueblob Aug 16 '22 at 10:37
  • I know that it's not just me, this also goes for others, I wouldn't use the designer even if the make it one. The main reason is that generally, the designer adds too much extra data to the XAML. For example, if you drop a control into the designer, it'd add specific position coordinates and other stuff. I hope you give it a try. You'll get used to write XAML and you'll be able to see the results in your head. – Andrew KeepCoding Aug 16 '22 at 10:45
  • Mhm, we have different goals. I don't know about you, but i do it as a hobby. For real professional devs there may be no need for this. But for example: as a kid i started with VBA .NET WinForms, because this had the UI Designer in some sort of WYSIWYG manner. That is the real eye catcher. With this MS could motivate me (and other people on YouTube) to use this thing. The learning curve is way better with a designer, than without. I admit the WinForms designer had problems when rendering a layout made in Win7 on a Win8 desktop. But for the start is was totally fine. – blueblob Aug 16 '22 at 10:56

0 Answers0