Hello once again from the XAML tooling team in Visual Studio. Given this week’s many new and exciting releases at , so if you missed that post I recommend giving it a read as well.
In this blog post we will focus on what’s new in the most recent release of and (it installs side-by-side with your release version too!), and continue to read below for all the details and instructions on how to enable some of these features – after the preview is installed.
XAML Binding Failure Troubleshooting
Our biggest feature in this release is a new experience designed to make it easier for developers to detect when bindings have failed in their running application and easily see the details of the failure in a dedicated window.
This feature is implemented as a combination of two improvements:
- New XAML Binding failure indicator icon in the in-app toolbar for WPF and UWP applications. This icon will turn red if at least one binding failure is detected and hovering your mouse over the icon will show you the total number of failures in the tooltip. Clicking the icon will take you to the new XAML Binding Failures window.
- New XAML Binding Failures window that brings binding failure details previously only available in the Output window and makes them easy to review in the new dedicated window. The window adds features such as sorting, searching and grouping of similar errors. This experience works for WPF, UWP and Xamarin.Forms projects (Note that Xamarin.Forms version 4.5.0.266-pre3 or higher is required).
Once you install the preview, this feature is available by default without requiring for you to take any further actions. You should see it appear in your XAML files no matter which framework you are targeting (WPF, UWP or Xamarin.Forms).
The only limitation in this release is when the color is coming from a resource dictionary, then it won’t be visible at this time (and we are working to enable this before the final release).
XAML Designer
- The new WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework projects which brings the same designer and extensibility support available for WPF .NET Core developers to .NET Framework developers. Benefits of this improved XAML designer include faster load performance, 64-bit configuration support (custom controls will load normally just like they do in x86 configuration), improved stability and new features such as Suggested Actions. To get started go to Tools > Options > Preview Features and select “New WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework” and restart Visual Studio. Do note this is still a work-in-progress so things like 3rd party extensibility won’t work in most cases.
- Suggested Actions enables WPF .NET Core and UWP developers easy access to most used properties when a standard built-in control (example: CheckBox, Button, Grid, Label, etc.) is selected within the XAML Designer. To use this feature, first enable it through Tools > Options > Preview Features > XAML Suggested Actions. Once enabled, click on a supported control and use the lightbulb to expand and interact with the Suggested Actions UI.
has gone “GA”, so when you update to this release the above-mentioned features will all be available.
Now let us dive into the details.
XAML Hot Reload Improvements
XAML Hot Reload is a relatively new feature for XAML desktop developers, though it has been in the product and improving constantly since Visual Studio 2017. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it enables you to open and change your XAML files (pages, windows, custom controls, resources, etc.) and see those updates in real-time while your application is running in a Visual Studio debug session.
To learn more, is now available for both WPF and WinForms developer, for both .NET Framework & .NET Core applications. This new chromium-based embedded browser allows you to render rich web content within your .NET or C++ desktop apps
Closing, your feedback really matters!
Thank you for reading this blog post and being a XAML developer, we really appreciate your reports of bugs and feature requests as it truly influences a lot of what we implement. Please keep this feedback coming through appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.
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