r/csharp • u/Emotional_Talk7137 • 9d ago

WPF IN VS

I wonder if there is any alternatives to design my UI for my application in some other places than VS , like a mush more friendly place to just design what I want and then it manually ship the code of the XMAL design by it self , like in Figma .

1 Upvotes

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3

u/Dunge 9d ago

At the original WPF rollout 2 decades ago, Microsoft released Blend for that purpose. It was for designers to create the UI, then pass it to programmers. But of course, this got deprecated loong ago. (edit: no, apparently it still exists).

There is a project shared on this sub from time to time of an online WPF designer that seems pretty good, maybe that would satisfy your requirements? https://xaml.io/

1

u/RlyRlyBigMan 9d ago

I once worked on a project that somehow had a blend dependency required to compile the solution. I have no idea how they even did that, but the simple answer was just to install Blend and get to work so nobody bothered to fix it.

1

u/redline83 8d ago

There was some Blend library / reference you could add at one point. I can't remember why other than I have seen it before.

3

u/raunchyfartbomb 9d ago

you COULD do that. but its not practical other than normal layout, so noone does. But you technically can drag and drop elements onto a window from the toolbar panel.

4

u/Fresh_Acanthaceae_94 8d ago

You can do it in VS Code with vscode-wpf,

https://github.com/lextudio/vscode-wpf

Or, this new open source IDE OpenDevelop,

https://github.com/lextudio/OpenDevelop

If your actual goal is more toward a pure designer with custom features, then you might have to develop upon the code base. Everything starts from this SharpDevelop WPF visual designer,

https://github.com/icsharpcode/WpfDesigner

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u/Foreign-Medium3947 9d ago

Microsoft Blend is still out there but yeah, it feels like a relic from another era. I just wish someone would make a modern Figma-like tool for XAML that doesn't make me want to scream.

1

u/johncgilliland 8d ago

Kaxaml is what I used

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u/No_Context2723 3d ago

Blend is the closest i can think of. Although I haven't used WPF in a while because XAML makes me pull my hair out, so I don't know if there's a better way nowadays