Proposal: Designer for everyone

[Shadowblitz16]

Proposal: [Designer for everyone]

Summary

Can we have a designer that suits not only the needs of xaml designers but also winforms designers?
Here are a list of things I think are good qualities of both...

• Winforms property grid is easy to use
• Winforms events are easy to use
• Winforms supports static layout
• Winforms outline view can be dragged and dropped to rearrange the hierarchy of controls
• Winforms snapping and grid alignment
• Winforms titlebar renderer
• Winforms rows based properties (easier to read)
• Xaml commands
• Xaml hot reload
• Xaml the little dot icon you can click to bind to things
• Xaml easy binding
• Xaml the distance info when aligning controls
• Xaml property group folding

Here are some bad things that I think are in both

• Winforms data binding requires implementing INotifyChanged
• Winforms property grid is hard to extend with custom types
• Xaml window is part of designer window instead of a separate window
• Xaml no option for code generation (xaml only, this makes it hard to correct a broken designer if you don't know xaml)

Rationale

• {A good designer increase productivity}
• {A easy designer brings in new users}
• {A flexible designer can replace coding it manually}

Scope

don't understand this. :c

Important Notes

I think both designers have good qualities but I think the xaml one has less because you were expected to xaml manually,
So the the designer never got much love.

I also do think that one of the reason winforms is still used is because it's just easier to learn and pickup.
Its also one of the reasons I got into C#

Open Questions

Didn't see any

[huoyaoyuan]

The "rich" xaml designer is Blend. It hasn't been ported for latest xaml features though.

[mdtauk]

Blend hasn't been a rich or great Xaml designer since it became VisualStudio Blend

Expression Blend 3 was really a design focused tool.

I suspect the idea in the future, will be moving all/most design tasks to Figma, with a plugin to export XAML. Fine for laying out UIs, but not great for animation, control templates, or visual states.