Disable WPF Designer in VS 2010?

Question

Is there a way to disable the WPF constructor (preview panel, I need a XAML panel with intellisense) in VS 2010?

Please note that when hiding the design view of the WPF constructor, it will still display the form / control ... I do not think this is disabled.

I see only the option "Open With" + "XML Editor", which does not give almost faithfulness to the default XAML design.

Answer 1

I do not know about 2010, but in 2008 you can use Tools-> Options-> Text Editor-> XAML-> MI Miscellaneous → "Always open documents in full XAML view"

Perhaps this helps.

Answer 2

I have not tried this in Visual Studio 2010, but in 2008 you can treat XAML files as XML files (and therefore use a standard XML text editor, not an XML editor). You can do this by right-clicking the XAML file, select Open With, select the XML file from the list, and then set it as the default.

At least in 2008 you still had pretty good intellisense, but none of the overhead of the XAML designer.

Answer 3

Try disabling "Automatically populate the toolbar" in addition to Open in the XAML view (in the same dialog box). This seems to really improve performance.

Answer 4

Finally, I ended up using a rather pragmatic approach to this problem. Tested with VS 2012, but should be the same for 2010 or 2013. Note that I have several simpler WPF forms where I want to have a constructor, but not for complex ones, where it is super-slow and partly doesn't work like that otherwise. In this case, I run the following script package:

:loop taskkill /F /IM XDesProc.exe timeout /t 10 /nobreak goto loop