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Add visual designer integration via XAML Studio #5
Description
I think a solid UI framework extension should support several options together.
- Hot Reload with the live app (with debugger or not)
- XAML Live Preview
- XAML visual designer
While the visual designer might be challenging to develop from scratch, Microsoft already made XAML Studio open source, so that code base can be reused here to ensure a seamless development experience (event handler creation, for instance).
But a few integration spots might still rely on a language server as a bridge.
vscode-wpf achieved such designer integration via WXSG language server and SharpDevelop WPF designer, which might be used as a reference.
Activity
alvinashcraft commentedon Jul 19, 2026
XAML Studio still uses mostly UWP code. They have a WinUI branch, but it hasn't been touched for years and doesn't currently build cleanly.
I just released v4.0.0 with a first pass at an editable webview designer, but it's not anything close to pixel-perfect yet. You can still switch to the ready-only native-rendered preview view if you're on Windows.
The designer was inspired by this new WPF/WinForms extension with designer: https://github.com/coolshrimp/WinForm-GUI-Maker
I'll continue to iterate and improve the experience, and hopefully one day get the native experience working with edits.