WPF, Blend of Visual Studio?

5
votes

I have heard of complaints using WPF (the xaml designer) with VS 2008-2010, but not with 2012. Is it still the standard to using Blend or does VS 2012 have everything we need? I know there was a recent release "Blend for Visual Studio". Is this the magic integration?

This is of course assuming that we don't have designers demanding Blend.

1
wpfvisual-studio-2012expression-blendblend-2012
I personally don't like using Blend, it adds a lot of XAML fluff for many operations. VS has everything I need. I'm sure there's some things are much much easier in Blend, but ... maybe I'm a dinosaur but I like my XAML hand coded. – kenny
I agree with Kenny, there is a bit of a learning curve to using blend as well if you never used it before. However you can create some amazing looking views/controls with blend if your up to putting the time into it. Blend is really just a feature that allows greater customization, I think for the average application you should be able to do most of want you want in visual studio. – TMan
Good answers. I would have accepted either if they weren't a comment. – Paul Knopf
Blend lets you design Animations/Visual States....VS doesn't support that.... stackoverflow.com/questions/10874005/… – Colin Smith
Since Intellisense for XAML is quite bad in VS2012 it might be easier for WPF beginners to use Blend for designing their UI. @kenny: Sometimes even hand coded XAML can be a huge mess. If you just use Blend there is nearly no need to touch any XAML code – Tobias Valinski

1 Answers

5
votes

As of Visual Studio 2012, the XAML design experience is based on the same code that runs in Expression Blend for Visual Studio. This will greatly enhance the design experience in VS, but it still isn't the full feature set offered by Blend.

One caveat though: the current version of Expression Blend for Visual Studio (free now, with VS, BTW) is only for Windows Store Apps. Support for WPF, SL, Windows Phone, and SketchFlow will be available in Visual Studio Update 2. If you need it before then, you can download the preview version.