SD Times provides news, insights, and analysis on software development trends, technologies, and tools. Developers can stay updated on the latest industry news, product releases, and software development methodologies. Additionally, SD Times covers topics such as DevOps, agile practices, and software testing, offering resources for software developers, architects, and IT professionals.

SD Times

Microsoft has open sourced XAML Studio, a developer tool for rapidly prototyping UWP XAML interfaces. The tool offers live editing, binding debugger, IntelliSense, and other development features. Originally created in 2017 as XamlPad+ during a hackathon, it last had a public release in 2019. The project now exists under the .NET Foundation as a seed project, with version 2 in development focusing on back-end improvements and WinUI 3 support rather than major new tooling features.

XAML Studio is now open source

<p>I liked where xaml was going, but it became a mess very quickly, with tough decisions getting avoided which resulted in <em>checks notes</em> 6 diferent versions across the application space. I think if they had a real first class UI designer it would have been a hit. Coming from flash, silverlight was a massive miss, only ever used for videostreaming, and even then was clunky.
I think this was down to Microsofts focus on Enterprise penetration more than anything else.
They’re still messing up the WPF narrative, with MAUI proclaiming its still not dead, and a new standard being created to fix the issues with too many versions (insert XKCD).
WPF could have, but wasn’t. Who knows though, maybe it will have a resurgence as the LLM weapon of choice for Windows Desktop development.</p>
