I have searched through all the settings but cannot find if this is possible.
Changing the gap guide warning in wpf designer. See the red area.
The defaults are good but in most situations I need to move them without guide to fit nicely on the view.
Designing would be a lot faster specially for a full-stack less designing-talent dude. :D
I don't have VS 2012 installed anymore but even so, I do not see a way to do this in the Visual Studio 2015 designer nor 2017.
But... Blend does have options to adjust the spacing. Under Tools -> Options -> XAML Designer -> Artboard.
Related
I'm a WPF developer and use VS Pro 2012 everyday for UI adjusting and coding. I installed Blend for Visual Studio but I never used it (just launched it by accident several times).
I'm afraid that I missed something by not using Blend. If I did miss something, what is it then?
Blend lets you design WPF UI, create controls and determine their behaviors visually (by UI), and Visual studio lets you do that programatically.
There is nothing you can do in blend, that you can't do in visual studio.
It is a tool for people who are less comfortable using code, and more comfortable using a cool UI to create custom controls and behaviors and design thier UI
In Visual Studio 2012 and later, the WPF UI designer is Blend; it's actually loaded in the background and accessed through out-of-process COM interfaces. This is part of the reason its behavior can be a bit bizarre at times, why you get messages about being able to edit the XAML while the design surface is loading.
If you're used to VS form builders you're going to be fine with Visual Studio.
Installing WPF Controls onto a machine is a messy task.
I tested installation in various systems including VMs. Following are the issues I have seen.
Controls not installed in the VS Toolbox.
Controls are isntalled but, cannot be dragged-n-dropped onto the WPF Window
Duplicate entries in the Toolbox sometimes!
I do not know what is wrong with the ToolboxControlsInstaller package. It messes up the Toolbox all the time, well most of the times.
Any guidelines what is the best practices to install WPF controls?
Our customers are very annoyed with these Toolbox behaviors.
Any help is welcome!
Regars,
-Datte
Our customers were annoyed too.
So I wrote this tutorial article covering toolbox installation once and for all:
Visual Studio Toolbox Control Integration
The most convenient approach seems to be using the Toolbox Controls Installer (TCI) package already pre-installed in VS2010 and newer. This includes just adding a key in registry, i.e.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ToolboxControlsInstaller\SampleControl, Version=3.7.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3cc4c7b61201d46c
You can also specify a custom tab name.
If you don't have a custom installer for your components, wrapping the DLLs in a VSI or VSIX package may be convenient. The VSIX is more powerful, support quiet install, custom tab name and uninstallation, but only VS2010 or newer.
Be careful with registry + VS2012. I discussed how the registry should be updated for VS2012, or simply call:
devenv.exe /ResetSkipPkgs
and then
devenv.exe /Setup
To clear things up.
Sometimes one also have to clear the Toolbox cache (TBD files), which seems to be a quite evil thing!
How do you install WPF controls into toolbox? However, these are all common issues with Visual Studio toolbox if you(or someone while installing other components) have done some mistakes in configuring. Refer the below links which has suggestions to avoid these issues.
Installing controls to VS 2010 procedure : How to add my custom WPF control to the ToolBox by using the WPF ToolBox Control template
Icons messed up issue : Visual studio 2005 toolbox icons messed up (though this is not reported with VS 2010, this solution would work for VS 2010 also).
I use Visual Studio 2010 for WPF development of desktop apps. I edit my XAML with the visual editor, often tweaking it manually. My code-behind is C#. I haven't had any particular problems with this arrangement.
What are the advantages of Expression Blend over Visual Studio for editing XAML? Why is Expression Blend so expensive (it's more expensive than I paid for Visual Studio!!) Are there other full-featured XAML editors which are cheaper? (I'm not talking about free ones like kaxaml - those are too limited)
Thanks in advance.
Expression Blend does not come stand alone any longer; it is part of Expression Studio which also provides SketchFlow, Design, and a couple of other tools.
Visual Studio is geared towards the development aspect while Expression Blend is geared towards the design aspect. Building animations and performing binding all within the UI of Expression Blend is possible; not forcing you to modify the XAML by hand. You can however modify the XAML directly within Blend as you can the C# code behind as well.
I typically use Blend to lay out the UI and then make use of Visual Studio for the code behind and tweaking of the XAML. Blend is definitely a nice tool to have within your tool belt and I would recommend you download the trial to get a better understanding on the offering.
I find that the main advantage of Blend is that the UI makes it very, very easy to create complex animations and transitions - really gorgeous user experience things - but you need to spend some time 'learning' Blend to do it. To write the XAML in Visual Studio to create the same effects would be much more difficult - Blend does it much quicker, and you can preview the results instantly. It's not easy (if it's even possible - I've honestly not tried the more demanding stuff) with Visual Studio.
When I return from debug mode, my visual studio 2008 environment takes a really long time to display the properties of a UI control (e.g. text box) I click on.
why does this happen? Is there a hotfix or update for this from microsoft?
Thanks for any help in advance.
Subbu
If you are using WPF, then this might be normal :) VS doesn't have a very quick WPF UI designer. Get Expression Blend, its designed for such things. If you're using WinForms, I'm not sure. I've often felt slowdowns when using 3rd party WinForms controls, such as Telerik or DevComponent's DotNetBar, but it is because references to these controls bring in huge DLL's of which you often only use a small portion of. It leads to bloat, which can slow down a UI designer. Hope this helps.
I am using:
Visual Studio 2010 Professional,
Silverlight 4 Toolkit
The WPF Designer don't show (invisible) - while the Component Toolbox is showing the relevant controls, and the Windows->Windows option shows the designer to be active. It does this with ALL XAML for me, regardless of its complexity. I have already tried the /ResetSkipPkgs to no avail. I had CodeRush and DevExpress installed (demo) version but removed both since. I can get along with XAML by switching to Source Code /Text Editor, but this really boils my chops to run the app to find out that I have made a silly mistake in my XAML (while a preview would sort it out quicker, and no, please don't suggest Expression Blend for it is non-nonsensical for me to switch continuously between these applications).
When I however switch the WPF Designer to open with Encoding I get the following error - which I assume is related to the issue for not showing the XAML Editor/Designer in non-encoding:
An Unhandled Exception has occurred
Click to reload the designer
System.NullReferenceException
Object Reference not set to an instance of an object.
at MS.Internal.Providers.VSDesignerContext.VSDesignerContextHolder..ctor(IServiceProvider services, VSDesignerContext context, Object docData)
at MS.Internal.Providers.VSDesignerContext.GetContext(IServiceProvider services, IVsWindowFrame frame, Boolean createIfNotExist)
at MS.Internal.Designer.TabbedEditorPane.MS.Internal.Designer.ITabbedEditorService.get_DesignerContext()
at MS.Internal.Designer.DesignerPane.InitializeDesigner()
I have googled it silly, to no avail. I am thinking about reinstalling Visual Studio - but this REALLY is a last resort. I hate fixing things by reinstalling, rebooting etc.
Any guru with the magical answer?
I got the exact same exception today and solved it by killing a few GDI hungry apps. You can see the number of GDI objects a process is using in the Processes tab of Task manager (you will probably need to add the column using View -> Select Columns).
Hmm, I know this is old, but you should try installing SP1 for your Visual Studio if you haven't yet.