Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 5. WPF Designer

The WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) Designer allows you to build WPF windows interactively much as the Windows Form Designer lets you build Windows Forms. It provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) surface where you can add controls to a window. If you select one or more controls on the designer's surface, the Properties window displays the objects' properties and lets you edit many of them.

In addition to the WYSIWYG design surface, the designer provides an XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) code editor. Here you can view and edit the XAML code that defines the user interface. This lets you edit properties and arrange controls in ways that are impossible using the WYSIWYG designer.

This chapter provides an introduction to the WPF Designer. It explains how to add controls to a window, move and size controls, set control properties, and add code to respond to control events.

Note that the initial build of Visual Basic 2008 introduces a bug in new WPF projects. For more information, see the section "Visual Basic 2008 Version 1 Warning" in the Introduction on page xxxix.

Early Version Warning

The version of the WPF Designer included in Visual Studio 2008 is really only the second version. (The first version was released as part of the "additive" release of the .NET Framework version 3.0. For more information, see msdn2.microsoft.com/library/aa480198.aspx and www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c2b1e300-f358-4523-b479-f53d234cdccf ...