Visual Studio WPF Designer
How to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) productively to create visually appealing and differentiating applications and to improve user experience.
Announcements
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available! Please send us your feedback...
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTWednesday, October 28, 2009 6:44 PMThe 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
Filtering and SortingUse these options to narrow down the question and discussion list.
- 0206

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available - What's new for WPF and Silverlight Designer Users?
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTWednesday, October 28, 2009 6:43 PM - 0591

Improving the Start-up Performance of the WPF and Silverlight Designer in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTTuesday, October 27, 2009 5:47 PM - 0145

New Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 WPF and Silverlight Designer Video on Channel 9
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTMonday, October 26, 2009 5:40 PM - 0303

Known Limitations in the d:DesignSource property on a CollectionViewSource, for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTMonday, October 19, 2009 3:33 AM - 239206

Solution: Intellisense broken in all WPF Projects after installing SDK/MSDN
Brett Kilty [MSFT] Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:57 PM - 93702

KB 963035 - Hotfix for periodic hangs in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 WPF designer.
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTWednesday, May 13, 2009 3:28 AM - 174990

What's new in Visual Studio 2010 for WPF & Silverlight developers ?
Mark Wilson-ThomasMSFTWednesday, March 25, 2009 1:10 AM - 64234

KB958017 - Rollup Hotfix for several issues in WPF Designer for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
Marco Goertz - MSFTMSFTMonday, November 03, 2008 5:56 PM - 26874

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) questions
Mark Boulter Monday, April 16, 2007 3:55 PM - 04043

How to report bugs in Cider
Mark Boulter Thursday, August 02, 2007 7:49 PM - 010141

Read First - Welcome to Cider!
chadr - msftMSFTMonday, December 19, 2005 7:20 PM - 059

user controls in wpf
chavik 16 hours 59 minutes ago - 087

Using Resources , applying to source ()
VengenceBot Saturday, November 07, 2009 12:56 AM - 1103

Collection Object Binding in WPF for a ListBox
UncleMeat Tuesday, November 03, 2009 9:10 PM - 139

Can not have more than 1 column in VS 2005 Web Control:ListBox
Ilya2 Friday, November 06, 2009 1:56 AM - 7173

VS 2010 Beta 2 always crashes
tobi1449 Tuesday, November 03, 2009 3:54 PM - 374416

WPF excruciatingly slow in Visual Studio 2008
Brian2p98 Wednesday, September 10, 2008 9:21 PM - 91649

Visual Studio 2008: WPF Xaml Designer Cripplingly Slow
ZenkeiRich Wednesday, July 22, 2009 7:56 AM - 044

How to achieve 2 decimal places
dean2d Wednesday, November 04, 2009 4:39 PM - 81580

possible bug
rhombus Tuesday, March 25, 2008 8:10 PM


