Visual Studio WPF Designer

Announcements

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available! Please send us your feedback...

  Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTWednesday, October 28, 2009 6:44 PM
  The Visual Studio WPF and Silverlight Designer Team is delighted to inform you that our Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release is now available for download here .
  
  
  What's New for WPF and Silverlight Developers in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release?
  
  This release includes a number of key improvements over the previous release (Beta 1), which we hope you will enjoy.
  
  Here's a list of some of the more notable improvements you should notice:
  
  1. The Silverlight Designer supports Silverlight 3 RTM release, and is a fully functional drag-drop designer
  2. The Data Sources Window now works for Silverlight 3
  3. The Propery Browser has been reworked to be more usable – showing a better Category view and a "Set Properties" view
  4. The designer now lets you load controls that have references to static resources at app scope
  5. The designer shows helpful errors when things such as controls fail to load, without the need to attach a debugger to Visual Studio.
  6. The designer is faster and more stable than it was at Beta 1, and we will be working to continue these improvements as we move towards release of the product (see note below on Registry Switch for improved performance)
  
  And of course we still have the feature set that was released at Beta 1 - check out these Channel 9 videos for more info:
  
  Designing Data Driven Forms
  
  Styling Your Forms
  
  Looking Forward
  
  In short, we are ready for your feedback, and look forward to hearing what you think!
  
  Registry Switch for improved performance
  
  Important:
  1. Since this was a late-breaking change, you may experience some instability or increased Virtual Memory usage in some Visual Studio scenarios when using it. If you see such instabilities, please try removing the configuration change, and let us know about the problem you saw (you can do this by replying to this posting or by raising a bug on Connect).
  
  2. You should only make this configuration change if you are a regular user of the WPF and Silverlight Designer, and are experiencing poor performance with it.
  
  3. This configuration change will allow you to see the best designer performance, but will not be necessary in the final released versions of the product.
  
  
  NOTE: Editing the registry can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall Windows. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. Refer to the article on registry editing for your OS (e.g http://support.microsoft.com/kb/136393) for advice. 
  
  1. Close any open VS instances
  2. Open RegEdit (as an administrator as needed)
  3. Select:
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 key (if you are running a 32 bit OS)
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 key (if you are running a 64 bit OS)
  
  4. Right click and add key, type ClrHost
  5. In the newly created key, right click and add a DWORD32 with the name StartupFlags
  6. Set its value to 5
  7. Close RegEdit
  8. Start up Visual Studio and use as normal
  
  
  Feedback
  We hope you enjoy the new features, and are really looking forward to hearing your feedback.
  
  You can send both positive and negative feedback and questions to us using this Forum, and we also encourage you to raise any bugs and issues you find via Connect (see this article on how to raise bugs in Cider)
  
  Thanks!
  
  Mark Wilson-Thomas
  Program Manager, WPF & Silverlight Designer Team, Visual Studio