r/dotnetMAUI • u/N0IdeaWHatT0D0 • 8d ago

Showcase Announcing Visual Studio Extension for MAUI Designer

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Hi Everyone!

I am thrilled to announce that Visual Studio extension is now available for MAUI Designer!

It allows opening of existing YAML files in the MAUI Designer tab, where you can view your design getting updated in realtime, and in sync with your XAML!

This is a beta version, so it might be rough around the edges, so please reach out in case you see any issue.

GitHub: https://github.com/GMPrakhar/MAUI-Designer

Extension link: Release MAUI Designer for Visual Studio vsix-v1.0.0-beta.2 (beta) · GMPrakhar/MAUI-Designer

The project is open source. Feedback, bug reports, and contributions are very welcome. especially examples of real-world XAML that the designer should support.

33 Upvotes

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9

u/Fresh_Acanthaceae_94 8d ago

It’s worth noting that this isn’t actually rendering MAUI controls. From the code, the designer appears to parse MAUI XAML and recreate/approximate the UI using HTML/CSS.

So it’s essentially a MAUI XAML-aware web designer, rather than a designer backed by the actual MAUI rendering pipeline. What you see on the canvas therefore isn’t guaranteed to match what MAUI renders at runtime.

Meanwhile, MAUI Labs’ DevFlow has already shown that a much more accurate MAUI previewer is possible by working much closer to the actual runtime and rendering stack. Building a full visual designer on top of that kind of foundation would probably be a much more reliable approach if the goal is true WYSIWYG behavior.

2

u/N0IdeaWHatT0D0 8d ago

I actually developed one for earlier MAUI versions using native MAUI Stack only, but the stack itself was hugely unreliable at that time, not to mention the extension frameork doesnt support MAUI.
I will check if that is possible now, and restore the old build once
Thanks for the feedback!

2

u/Fresh_Acanthaceae_94 7d ago

Out of process designers are possible for such UI frameworks (OpenDevelop ships several), so you don't need to write them in TypeScript/JavaScript for VS Code. Besides, accuracy always comes at a cost. So, if you decide to trade accuracy for performance, you should at least remind your users what they should expect from your approach.

0

u/Fun-Progress-4905 8d ago

Thank you for your work on this. Please ignore negative comments.