I'm a Silverlight newbie. Just downloaded version 3.0 after the Mix announcement. I'm running VS 2008 SP1. When I select a design element in the preview pane or in XAML, the properties window is disabled and displays
Property Editing Not Available
I can open the solution in Blend and have no problems with it's property editor. So within Visual Studio, I'm forced to enter everything in the XAML pane and rely on Intellisense.
Is something wrong with my installation or environment? Or am I supposed to switch back and forth between Expression Blend and Visual Studio (I can't believe that should be the case).
There is nothing wrong with your installation or environment. The XAML designer/editor in VS2008 is very limited in what it offers for XAML editing whatever the version of Silverlight, being really just a rendering engine at the moment.
Expression Blend is the visual editor of choice for now - there are 3rd party editors available (such as XAMLCruncher and Kaxaml) but they don't really support XAML with code-behind classes.
Additionally the Blend 3 preview that was released to support SL3 seems to have a few improvements which address previously inferior experience of directly editing XAML in Blend (notably IntelliSense).
I had the same problem with Visual studio 2010 and Silverlight 5.0. It was intermittent.
One thing I found to help is to switch the XAML page to show Design view and then switch back to Code view or vice versa. If you have hybrid view, just temporarily switch.
I did that and it just worked fine. I do n't know the reason it worked but it did.
Is something wrong with my installation or environment? Or am I supposed to switch back and forth between Expression Blend and Visual Studio (I can't believe that should be the case).
You'll find you need to do that a lot for both Silverlight and WPF if you want to make full use of the UI controls.
I find VS incredibly slow and clunky for designing and rendering XAML and much prefer Expression. Switching between the two is no big deal as really one's for code and ones for design.
I haven't download the Silverlight 3 Beta yet, but the Silverlight 2 designer intergration in visual studio is very poor.
VS 2010 is suppose to have better support for XAML Editing in WPF and Silverlight. So for now, you'll have to find the right balance between Blend and VS.
SilverLight 3.0 beta just shipped. VS2008 SP1 shipped last year. It would be surprising if it supported SilverLight 3.0 out of the box, and more suprising if the VS support that ships with SilverLight 3.0 beta were not "beta" quality.
If you find problems, then be certain to report them to Microsoft.
Related
Now that .net core support WinForms projects, I've ported an old project to .Net 5. I can edit code, desing GUI and compile, and everything seems to work fine except for Document Outline window (in Visual Studio 2019). All four buttons, move up, down, out and into, are disabled, so I cannot choose what to see on top at desing time.
I have created a new project from the scratch and those controls are still disabled.
Demo image:
Any idea why? I can guess it's something microsoft is working on, but I cannot find any reference to this issue.
That's how it looks like for .Net 4.5
I'm currently considering a big "no no" and jumping over to VS 2010 while it's still in RC... after all, text code is text code, how bad can it "F" things up?
I'm just wondering if anyone is using VS 2010 for their projects? I'm very much interested in the subtle additions as well as the multi-screen support.
I've been using it in a VM and it's been pretty stable and even resharper 5.0 has support for it now so it's as good as fully baked for my liking.
A few things to be careful of are:
the .sln files aren't backwards compatible so it won't be easy to share with other people not using VS2010.
There are a number of plugins that don't yet support VS2010 so if you depend on any third party plugins make sure they work
ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2 has a bit of funkiness so you should check out this post to make sure you've got all your stars aligned if you're using 2010 and MVC.
As you said first of all it is still in RC. People wouldn't upgrade the current Visual Studio version unless there is a reason for it.
If you are not going to use any of the features in .net 4.0, it is probably not important to switch to Visual Studio 2010.
We are using VS2010RC and TFS2010 for our projects in production.
Works great!!
What I like in VS2010 and use:
Test Manager for recording manual tests in Web, WPF, Windows Forms and soon in Silverlight. AWESOME!
Generating "Coded UI" tests
Hierarchical work items (TFS) finally :-)
What I like in VS2010 but don't use yet:
.NET4 features like: Parallel extensions, dynamic keyword, optional and named parameter
Yes, Multi Monitor support works a bit better, but was fine for me with VS2008 too
I have heard several podcasters (most recently the guys on DotNetRocks) say that the look and feel of Visual Studio 2010 has been completely redesigned and Visual Studio rewritten in WPF.
I have been watching some demos on channel9 of the Visual Studio 2010 CTP and the only thing that looks different to me is the opening screen.
I read the notice on MSDN, but it doesn't say anything about the look/design of Visual Studio.
Has Microsoft reversed direction on this or are there going to be major changes made to UI of the final product?
I'm guessing 3D with a space theme. You'll be able to "fly through" your code, "orbiting" classes, "shooting down" bugs and "launching" your code.
It's way too soon to make guesses about what it will look like: I don't even think that they know what it will look like.
However, from what I've heard, they are in fact rewriting portions to be WPF/C#, but they are not throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Instead, they will be rewriting portions as it makes sense. For example, I saw that they have some new UML tools that definitely look to be done in WPF.
Uh, the beta has been available for over a month. I have been playing with Visual Studio 2010 on and off. It is very similar to 2008 in overall design.
You can download it here and see for yourself where they are taking the product:
Download Page at Microsoft.com
There are a metic ton of videos on Channel9 about VS2010, TFS 2010 and then the PDC 2008 sessions online as well. They are also starting a new series called 10-4 dedicated just to VS2010 - a walk through of sorts.
Let's pray that they don't dink with anything, visually. My #1 guess is that they'll try and wrap the new office ribbon bar around our necks. ;|
I've heard that its going to have a historical debugger.
Also- this should prob be a wiki
From WPF Wonderland:
Visual Studio 2010 gets WPF facelift
WPF has been out for a couple years. That’s long enough that new releases of Microsoft products are sprouting WPF interfaces.
Last year at PDC Microsoft announced that the code editor in Visual Studio would be re-written in WPF. Microsoft didn’t stop at the code editor though. Today Jason Zander, GM for Visual Studio, revealed the new WPF based IDE.
Highlights from the PDC Keynote #1 on Day 2 (see: PDC website)
Multi-monitor support for the IDE via
WPF.
Building classes from test classes.
Toggle TFS bugs over a code segment
in Debug mode.
Partial config files for debug,
release.
WYSIWYG Silverlight Designer.
Is Visual Studio written in .NET Windows Forms? Or is Windows Forms just too slow for a editor type application?
This isn't quite a fair question. :)
Visual Studio .NET (devenv.exe) is not written directly in WinForms, as it is not a CLR executable. (My hunch is that it is still produced with Visual C++.) I know for fact that neither 2005 nor 2008 versions of devenv.exe carry a CLR header. (I just dropped them both on ILDASM; they're definitely not managed code.)
That said, just because devenv.exe isn't written in WinForms doesn't mean WinForms is too slow for an editor. WinForms isn't, on most systems, too slow at all -- our app code will be the bottleneck before the framework is.
My hunch is that devenv.exe is written in C/C++ due to it being an upgrade of a long-standing environment; the cost to Microsoft to rewrite it in .NET is undoubtedly prohibitive.
Again, as far as WinForms speed is concerned -- there are quite a few WinForms apps which have no performance issues whatsoever, including a fairly robust .NET IDE (SharpDevelop).
Apparently VS 2010 has parts written in WPF.
SharpDevelop is a .NET Windows Forms application.
This sounds a bit like a "Are you still beating your wife?" question with no answer that sounds good from Visual Studio's point of view.
No, Visual Studio (at least up to 2008) is not written using .NET. However, SharpDevelop and other editors are and do not suffer from speed problems necessarily.
At its core VS is still an unmanaged executable, so it doesn't use winforms. There may be portions written in .NET particularly around some of the newer features, but the core extensibility model is COM based (and very complex...)
If the VS team didn't use WinForms, you're suggesting that the only possible reason would be that WinForms is too slow. That's not valid. The fact that SharpDevelop's IDE is written in WinForms and performs fine shows that it isn't "too slow," regardless of what Visual Studio's IDE uses.
This is kind of two questions in one. As others have mentioned, Visual Studio does not use WinForms. Your other question has nothing to do with the first, as a) Visual Studio isn't an "editor," it's an IDE and b) it's begging the question.
That said, WinForms is an excellent choice for any Windows-based application, including an IDE (like the aforementioned SharpDevelop) and any "editor" you can imagine, up to and including audio and video. So no, it's not "too slow" for an "editor type application."
You are free, of course, to write slow code that runs in a Windows Forms application. :)
Based on my experience with the VS SDK, it looks as if it was built with C++/COM but I think that's just because the Visual Studio team decided to go with that (AND Windows Forms didn't exist as a release version when they were first developing the VS.NET IDE).
You can use Windows Forms for an editor type application. I think SharpDevelop is a WinForms app.
My university is part of MSDNAA, so I downloaded it a while back, but I just got around to installing it. I guess part of it replaces FrontPage for web editing, and there appears to be a video editor and a vector graphics editor, but I don't think I've even scratched the surface of what it is and what it can do. Could someone enlighten me, especially since I haven't found an "Expression Studio for Dummies" type website.
Expression Studio is basically a design studio. It consists of a bunch of design software that Microsoft has bought for the most part. The audience is designers, not developers. The gist of the software is that Expression Blend enables designers and programmers to work seamlessly together in letting the designer create the graphical user interface.
In a normal workflow, the designer would deliver a mockup which the developer would have to implement. Using Expression Blend in combination with WPF, this is no longer necessary. The graphical UI made by the designer is functional. All the developer has to do is write the code for the function behind the design.
This in itself is great because developers invariably fail to implement the design as thought out by the designer. Technical limitations, lack of communication … whatever the reason. UIs never look like them mockup done up front.
Expression Design is basically a vector drawing program that can be used to design smaller components that are then used within Expression Blend as parts of the UI. For example, graphical buttons could be designed that way. It can also be used as a vanilla drawing program. I did the graphics in my thesis using Expression Design.
The idea is that designers will work in Expression Design (to design vector artwork) and Expression Blend (to build and style XAML interactions, as well as to define timeline based animations and interactions).
Developers will work on the application in Visual Studio. Visual Studio includes very basic XAML editing capabilities, so developers would only be making minor edits and would mostly be focusing on the code-behind.
That's the theory / product strategy side of it. In reality, if you're performing both roles, you'll end up having your project open in both Expression Blend and Visual Studio, switching back and forth between them depending on whether you're doing "designer tasks" or "developer tasks". Fortunately, Expression Blend and Visual Studio use the same project files.
From Wikipedia:
Microsoft Expression Studio is a suite of design and media applications from Microsoft aimed at developers and designers. It consists of:
Microsoft Expression Web (code-named Quartz) - WYSIWYG website designer and HTML editor.
Microsoft Expression Blend (code-named Sparkle) - Visual user interface builder for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight applications.
Microsoft Expression Design (code-named Acrylic) - Raster and vector graphics editor.
Microsoft Expression Media - Digital asset and media manager.
Microsoft Expression Encoder - VC-1 content professional encoder.
For web development Expression Web is useful. For XAML development, Blend and Design are useful.
EDIT: Okay, I type too slow so most of what I had to say was already mentioned, so I'll strip it out except for...
The BIG thing to take note of is that the WSYWIG designer they used in Expression Web made it's way into Visual Studio 2008, which is a VERY GOOD thing. There is now EXCELLENT support for CSS, a better editing interface, and you can even go into a split edit mode to see the code and the content while editing.
For the longest time I was using Expression Web to do all my initial layout and then loading that into Visual Studio 2005. With Visual Studio 2008, there is no need to do it.
The Expression site is the first place to start. These are tools that bridge the developer/designer gap for building rich internet applications with Silverlight and WPF. They compete with Adobe Studio products.
Whilst Visual Studio is good for working with code, it has some weaknesses when it comes to dealing with XAML. In many cases a designer will build something visually different from a Windows application and Expression Blend allows them this freedom. It ties in Visual Studio for the C#/VB coding and debugging part of development.
Expression Studio is targeted more at designers. It integrates with Visual Studio in that Expression Studio uses solution and project files, just like Visual Studio. Which makes collaborating with designer easier. The developer and the designer open up the same project. The developer sets up the initial page with all the binding and the designer takes that page and makes it look pretty.
Please check for XAML .NET development, most of the tutorials makes use of many Expression tools.