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AvaloniaUI / Avalonia

Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology
https://avaloniaui.net
MIT License
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Winforms style designer for Avalonia? #4361

Open Shadowblitz16 opened 4 years ago

Shadowblitz16 commented 4 years ago

Can we get a xaml designer similar to winform's? I think we can all agree that visual studio's xaml designer is pretty poor unless your writing xaml and know what your doing.

I think something similar to winforms in which you can position and resize your controls and see the rectangle clearly. and something like the winforms property browser but with bindable options for each property.

the reason why I am making this suggestion is I hate xaml with a passion. now I know most people don't and thats why a lot of gui frameworks are in xaml but I would like a way of not having to touch it that doesn't involve using the default xaml designer

kekekeks commented 4 years ago

which you can position and resize your controls and see the rectangle clearly.

That's UI building approach is outdated. Like, two decades outdated. If we are going to get a UI designer, it will work more like GTK's Glade where you can drag controls into predefined layout slots.

glade

danwalmsley commented 4 years ago

@Shadowblitz16 its quite a difficult task to acheive that, I hope that something like what @kekekeks has suggested will be possible at some point in the future, but it would take someone dedicated to developing and maintaining that.

Shadowblitz16 commented 4 years ago

@kekekeks I like that one too as long as we can hide the xaml editor. I do think that each control property should have a circle icon where you can bind things to it though

ghost commented 3 years ago

I am surprised there is no designer for AXAML like XAML designer in Visual Studio. It would save lot of time. Couldn't find anything in Visual Studio, Avalon Studio, Rider etc. and different questions on stackoverflow and reddit.

Is there is any way to convert XAML created using XAML designer in Visual Studio to AXAML? A tool that automatically changes everything based on what is supported in Avalonia.

amwx commented 3 years ago

I am surprised there is no designer for AXAML like XAML designer in Visual Studio. It would save lot of time. Couldn't find anything in Visual Studio, Avalon Studio, Rider etc. and different questions on stackoverflow and reddit.

Is there is any way to convert XAML created using XAML designer in Visual Studio to AXAML? A tool that automatically changes everything based on what is supported in Avalonia.

.axaml is .xaml. The axaml file extension was added because Visual Studio kept altering the .csproj file to basically remove regular xaml files when they were added to the project, which created a headache b/c you had to go remove those additions in order to build the project. The designer Avalonia projects use is a custom editor in the VS extension b/c I believe the default WPF/UWP xaml designers don't work well with other frameworks (or are incompatible?). The bigger problem is that 99% of things regarding building extensions and designers in VS is undocumented (or outdated) so nothing makes sense and it's all just sort of hacked together, thus it's very minimal in features. It also doesn't help the VS team broke it even more with a change to intellisense a few versions back.

maxkatz6 commented 3 years ago

@amwx you are right, but I believe @prayank23 was asking about converting WPF xaml to Avalonia XAML, which is not possible.