Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Are You Annoyed With The Visual Studio XAML Design View?

I know I was! Sure, Visual Studio 2010 has a much improved designer (especially if you are working with Silverlight), but for the most part, the designer for Silverlight and WPF applications is pretty weak. I would much rather work in Blend or straight XAML. If I had to edit a XAML page in Visual Studio, I would always open the file and immediately switch to full XAML view. The designer always took too long to load and it wasted a lot of my time. Well, if you are in the same boat, here is a little tip. You can configure Visual Studio to always open XAML files in full XAML view and bypass the designer. To do this, go to the Tools menu and select Options. In the options dialog, select the Text Editor element on the left hand side and go to XAML and the Miscellaneous. Under the Default View section, make sure the ‘Always open documents in Full XAML view’ is checked and click ok. That should do it. From now on you will open your XAML files directly in the XAML view and you won’t have to wait for the editor to load and tell you it can’t render the XAML.

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Note: The version of VS I am running is VS 2010 Ultimate.

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5 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 4, 2010 at 3:56 PM

    Thank you so much for this information! It sure would've taken me a while to find it on my own. Now I don't have to sigh in exasperation every time I open a XAML file in VS 2010!

    ReplyDelete
  2. BrindaFebruary 3, 2011 at 2:50 PM

    I completely agree with you my friend. Thanks for sharing this it was very helpful in my day to day coding.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJuly 5, 2012 at 12:12 PM

    Awesome! Thanks a lot for sharing this, makes my day.

    -Amit

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousNovember 22, 2012 at 10:56 AM

    This does not change anything, as Visual Studio still loses it's time loading the design view, even though it is not showing.

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  5. UnknownDecember 6, 2012 at 1:56 PM

    The XAML editor even in VS2012 is still slow and buggy. If it's not constantly loading, it's constantly crashing. I've never got through a coding session without it giving me a headache. I understand it's more interactive than the WinForms editor but at least you can drag a button onto that without a crash. It's like I can hear the XAML editor thinking "oh man, he just put the button on the form, let's make him wait 20 seconds and spike all 4 cores on his processor, *evil cackle*".

    ReplyDelete

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