Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Xaml Designer

It's been quiet for some time now. But now I finally started a new project an now I am at a state where I can show a little bit.

Xaml Designer

It's a simple editor for xaml with a graphical UI Designer.


I needed a Graphical UI Designer where I could load a *.xaml file and be able to manipulate this. The Project then started as a Test application to see how I could manipulate the XAML. Then I also wanted to see the resulting XAML and be able to manipulate it. So I looked around for a code TextBox. I found a few editors but was not very happy with them so I decided to create a new editor.

I created the Code editor from scratch. There are still some important features missing for a Code edtior like Intelisense (Autocomplete) and the automatic indentation rules.
The Synthaxhighlighting currently only supports C# and XML/XAML. The highlighting Engine is based on xml files. This way the editor can be extended very easily.

The UI Designer was also created from scratch. At the moment it supports selecting an element and Drag & Drop. With this function elements can be moved around and placed in different positions. The elements can be dropped in most Panels and ContentControls. ItemsControl and the remaining Panels still need to be implemented.

At the left side there is the LogicalTree to help selecting elements.

Next I will create a PropertyGrid to be able to change properties without having to edit the XAML.

At the moment I only support WPF but Silverlight is also planned and probably also WinRT.
But at the moment I am far away from any Beta or pre-stable version. I mostly use it in Debug mode and fix the errors on the run.
Hopefuly I will soon have a version ready for release.

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