I am setting up the project structure for a new greenfield application. Our initial release will only support a WPF client, but we want to eventually roll out Metro and Silverlight clients as well. I decided on the following:
Core Library - Portable class library targeting .NET for metro, .NET 4.5, SL4, Windows Phone 7.5
WPF Application - Targeting .NET 4.5
Our Model/ViewModel layer is defined in the Core Library, View defined in the WPF Application. I chose .NET 4.5 in order to support defining the viewmodel in the core library in a way that can be consumed by both WPF and Metro.
This works fine in the Visual Studio 11 Beta running on Windows 7 Pro. I have a working view that is data bound to the ViewModel defined in the Core Library. My problem is Blend. When I open the View in Blend, I get no designer. I suspect the problem here is support for WPF on .NET 4.5. I have tried Blend 4 and Blend for VS11 Beta.
Does anyone know how to get the designer working in Blend for WPF views as described above?
*Status as of 2012-05-10: No combination of VS11 and Blend appear to support WPF 4.5.
Since Visual Studio 2012, Update 2, the preview version of Blend (Blend + Sketchflow Preview for VS2012) has been merged with into the vanilla "Blend for Visual Studio 2012". This means that there is now a single designer application for all XAML platforms:
With Blend (for Visual Studio 2012), you can design and build:
- Windows Store apps
- Windows Phone apps
- Sketchflow prototypes
- Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications