WPF Stability in VS2008 Express - wpf

I'm having trouble with stability in the xaml editor. Restart VS 25 times a day has become tedious. Are there strategies that would minimize the problem or an open source alternative that provides a visual display? Any help would be sincerely appreciated! I don't want to jump out the window but I will... I WILL!

If you don't need the designer, you can just switch to the default editor for XAML files to "Source Code Editor", which still provides completion and is way faster and more responsive.

The stability of Visual Studio XAML designer greatly improved when I installed the product hotfixes.
Here is one such one that may be of help with your situation:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958017
Hope this helps!

Related

Strange Design Problems With Infragistics Controls

I'm working on an existing WinForms application and I am having some weird issues with Infragistics controls in a WinForms app.
When I open a form or usercontrol in the project that has Infragistics controls on it, it looks like
this http://sdrv.ms/S7gvmS
I cannot access any of the controls in the design surface. Clicking does nothing. And, all of the controls appear in the lower area.
So I created a new test solution and dropped some Infragisstics controls on and got this http://sdrv.ms/SRdo2y
Anyone know what's going on?
When I've run in to similar issues before it's tended to be a license or version problem, the Infragistics libraries contain code stopping them working at design-time if a valid license isn't installed. To resolve this, I'd first recommend deleting all of the *.licx files in your solution. These can be easily corrupted especially if you're using source control and should be regenerated correctly when you go in at design time. If that fails, then I'd try uninstalling and reinstalling Infragistics ensuring the version installed matches those of your projects' reference.
P.S. Realise this is far too late to help the original poster but hopefully will help people coming across similar issues in the future.
This happens when Visual Studio cannot find the Design assembly. The components refer to a designer and if Visual Studio cannot find the designer, it makes the assumption that the object is a component instead of a control and places it in the system tray.
Typically, this indicates that something when wrong with your installation of the components, so the usual solution is to re-install.

Center-Align Form in Windows Form Designer

I've become accustomed to the WPF designer, I'm wondering if it's possible to align a form in the center of the designer, rather than top-left.
The answer is no. The designer in VS 2010 does not allow the user to situate the form in any other configuration.
The short answer to this question is "No", visual studio does not have this feature. While there are not any good options what I can think of to address this is to take a look at Sharp Develop, an alternative open source solution to Visual Studio and if that does not have this feature in it, you can submit a bug into their issue tracking system and hope someone picks it up. Perhaps if you are feeling frisky enough you can even take on this IDE feature yourself and submit a patch. Like I said, not a good option, but it's an option.
Go the designer view, then go to the start position into the properties, and then set I to the center screen

How can I disable Cider (WPF Gui Editor) within VS2010?

When opening a XAML file in VS2010 Professional, the studio becomes unresponsive for 5-7 seconds and many local controls are marked with error bars, since they do not support design time usage. This also happens after a debugged application is terminated.
I've got a i5 CPU, 16GB RAM and an SSD, so I don't think my H/W specs are at fault.
I'm already opening documents in full XAML view (as suggested here) and I've closed all clutterboxes (Toolbar, Document Outline, Data Source) to no avail.
Currently I'm using the XML editor for my sanity, but of course this also means no IntelliSense at all.
Is there a way to completely disable the WPF Designer in Visual Studio 2010 without loosing XAML IntelliSense capabilities?
I don't know if there is a way to use a lightweight XML editor that preserves IntelliSense inside Visual Studio. However I suggest you to try kaxaml.
From the website:
Kaxaml is designed to be "notepad for XAML." It's supposed to be simple and lightweight and make it easy to just try something out. It also has some basic support for intellisense and some fun plugins (including one for snippets, one for cleaning up your XAML and for rendering your XAML to an image).
I had the same problem with WPF XAML. The only way I found so far is to use XML editor. Yes, you will not have IntelliSense anymore but there is no better way here. Using external editors like Kaxaml helps only for primitive XAML files which do not use anything from other XAMLs (Kaxaml doesn't support projects or at least didn't supported them, so it is not useful for real projects). You can also try using Expression Blend for editing XAML files but it is also not that good alternative.
Please add
if (DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(this))
return;
to Constructor, OnApplyTemplate and Loaded event handler, that will ignore all design time processing and make the controls load faster.

visual studio 2008 IDE not displaying UI control properties

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.

WPF design rendering is dramaticaly slow Visual Studio 2008? Are there any tweaks that could speed it up?

I just wanted to do some tutorials in WPF but I find that the designer works very slow in comparision to Windows Forms/GDI+.
Are there any tweaks to speed it up?
If you're just after a bit of XAML editing, you can use a separate editor, such as XamlPad. That has much quicker rendering than the VS designer.
I turned it off.
Right click the xaml file in Solution explorer,
use Source code (Text) Editor
Set it as default
Good thing is Intellisense still works!
In case you need to view the Design view occasionally, you can still Right click -> Design view.
Turn it off. The VS XAML designer is awful and doesn't work anyway as soon as your XAML is non-trivial. Go into your options and map the .xaml extension to the regular XML Editor.
you can look in the following link.
quite same as the previous answers."How to speed up Visual Studio 2008's slow WPF designer"

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