//build – Visual Studio 11, XAML
One of the areas of investment for VS 2011 is around the support for XAML:
- Single XAML designer for C#, C++ and VB, the previous version never really felt like it was finished, an initial look at the VS11 it looks much improved
- The core authoring features of the Blend XAML editor have been integrated into Visual Studio 11, this doesn’t include the complete toolset such as the story board editor, but clearly makes for a more useful editor
- Hiding of XAML elements easy via the document outline
- Re-parenting of elements can be easily done in the document outline view
- Colour picker added, which even works for gradients
- Zoom (mouse wheel with mouse over centre of zoom position) and pan (space bar and left mouse)
- There are some XAML changes for the Win8 release (compared to .NET 4.0), its closest to Silverlight
- Support through the designer to navigate to bound data
- New data binding dialog
- Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be support yet for binding commands when using MVVM, the toolset only appears to support setting an event handler in the code behind
- The VS preview includes a patch for the designer to fix an issue with the mouse not releasing selection
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