Introducing the WPF Designer

We introduced the WPF Designer in Chapter 6, “Introducing the Editors and Designers.” Let’s recap the basics and then move on to a more involved discussion of the WPF Designer.

The WPF Designer is the tool in Visual Studio that provides the WYSIWYG design surface for building WPF windows. In many ways, it behaves just like the designers we use for web forms and Windows forms. But it is in fact a brand-new tool, with some subtle differences over its IDE brethren. To see the designer in action, let’s create a new project in Visual Studio. The project template we want to select is WPF Application, and it is located in the Windows category on the New Project dialog box (see Figure 21.3).

FIGURE 21.3 Creating a new WPF application.

This template takes care of adding the necessary WPF namespaces for us; the project also includes a file that implements the default window for the application: MainWindow.xaml. Double-clicking the Window1.xaml file launches the designer, which is shown in Figure 21.4.

FIGURE 21.4 The WPF Designer.