For those who have spent time in Visual Studio 2010, and work with WPF, how much better, if any, is the designer for WPF? Are other designers, such as Blend, still preferred, or can we be productive in VS 2010?
The WPF Designer in VS 2010 is hugely improved over the one in 2008.
It handles many more unusual cases without breaking, and does a better job overall.
That being said, with a few exceptions, it's still the same fundamental design as the 2008 designer. There are some new features, particularly for auto-generating forms based on data, etc, but overall, it works the same way.
As a result, I still find Blend a much nicer tool, overall, for working with WPF from a designer standpoint. I'm just very happy that the designer doesn't "break" as often, especially when doing things like using Blend behaviors, etc.
VS2010 WPF designer is much closer to the level of WinForms designer than it was in VS2008 - I would say it will suit typical programmer quite well. However Blend is still needed if you are a designer.
Also, I found VS2010 designer much more stable than VS2008 SP1 one. Not a single crash so far.
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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.
I have been developing in WPF using VS2010 for a few months now and have just upgraded to VS2012 Professional and noticed it comes with Blend for VS.
Is this expected to replace GUI design in VS or is it for doing "extra" bits that cant be done in VS?
I want to know if I need to spend time learning this new tool?
Blend is primarily used to make designing your app easier. It can be used to replaced the Visual Studio designer but it's better to use VS to create the backend code. Assuming you have the same project opened in VS and Blend, when you make changes in one, the other will ask to reload these new changes.
Blend makes it a lot easier to write your XAML (since it's a WYSIWYG editor) but also provides easy access to some of the more complicated aspects such as data binding. You could do all this in VS, and by hand, but Blend just makes it more efficient. It also has nicer workflow features from a designer perspective such as having the ability to zoom in and out.
You don't have to learn to use it, but I prefer using Blend for the GUI design and VS for the code-behind.
In my WPF App, I have designed the Form using Expression Blend. To my surprise, the rendering is quite different when I load the solution using Visual Studio 2008. What is even more surprising, when I run the application, the resulting UI is different from the rendering done by both VS and Blend. Though I have not provided by XAML code, but in general is this a known Issue?
This is most definitely a known issue. Visual Studio uses what's known as the Cider designer to render WPF code. It most definitely renders XAML differently from Blend. Cider in VS2008 is pretty terrible, but gets much better in 2010 (but is still pretty terrible compared to Blend). One of the main differences between Cider and Blend is that Cider will read the code behind file (*.xaml.cs) while Blend will completely ignore it. Another notable difference is that Cider doesn't really understand things like Visual States and Blend SDK Behaviors (especially when you mix the two) while Blend completely understands them.
If you're constructing your view classes where you set your DataContext in XAML and then provide design time data (using Blend or a view model locator), you'll find that there are very few differences between Blend and how something actually looks at runtime.
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.
I'd like to move my project's ActiveX controls to (preferably) WPF or WinForms. My customers aren't expert .NET programmers, but they're able to use WinForms to do basic drag-drop to use my controls. I've experimented with the VS 2010 WPF designer, and it seems like the drag-drop experience is much less intuitive than WinForms.
Is it realistic to expect occasional programmers to be able to use the WPF designers in Visual Studio (or Expression Blend) to build these kinds of simple GUI's? Also, what's the simplest available WPF designer?
It depends on how familiar you are with WPF or WinForms.
WPF has many advantages (full transparency support, etc.), but surely is more complex than WinForms.
In addition, WPF comes with a totally new programming experience: Without using patterns like MVVM you soon will be lost as things don't work as in WinForms.
To your customers:
If they are able to target at least .NET 3.0 you can provider wrapper controls using System.Windows.Forms.Integration.ElementHost.
Thus, they could profit from using everything "as before" and you could profit from a more powerful UI-API.
Expression Blend is a much better WPF designer then Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2010 is slightly better than 2008, but Expression Blend has either Visual Studio version beat.