Microsoft has stated today that it has updated the XAML Designer with significant updates. The XAML Designer is a tool that is used with Visual Studio and Blend to build beautiful UI for Windows applications.
XAML Designer was designed in 2007 primarily for WPF development and the company has made several significant changes in these years to increase productivity but that resulted in less reliability and degraded performance. However, the company is working very hard ever since to make it worthy of being the first choice of developers and designers. Here are the areas of improvement that Microsoft has focused on –
- UI of the XAML Designer
- Performance in terms of fast loading and the weight of XAML Designer application
- Fidelity, especially focused on rendering the artefacts introduced by the new Windows Fluent Design System
- Reliability and compatibility with .NET Core by eliminating the factors that result in application getting crashed.
- A high-level Architectural redesign to make the designer surface process (UwpSurface.exe) as lightweight and small as possible.
For a complete list of changes and updates, you can read the
release notes.
However, the company has noted that these significant changes in the XAML Designer may not reflect for the UWP applications targeting Windows 10 Creators Update. Instead, the new XAML Designer updates target the apps that are build focusing Fall Creators Update in the latest Visual Studio Preview release. So, as of now, these changes are to collect the feedback from developers in order to make the XAML designer much better during the course of time.
Microsoft states in a
blog,
"This release of the updated XAML designer is a very early preview of what’s to come and might be rough around the edges. The drastic nature of the changes has resulted in us disabling some of the features that previously existed in the XAML designer, as well as shipping with known issues (called out in the release notes). As a result, we are only releasing the updated designer for a small subset of XAML scenarios – specifically, for developers building UWP applications that target the Fall Creators Update. If you were building a WPF application or a UWP application targeting the existing Windows 10 Creators Update or earlier, your experience will remain unchanged."