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I have a project that was created in Blend + Sketchflow preview for Visual Studio 2012. It is a simple project as I am learning C# and WPF for the first time. I have two windows. A simple start screen with a button that shows the other screen. The other screen has 4 buttons which change colors during a random order animation sequence.

My problem is that the design view became disabled. I can not open any XAML in design view anymore or edit any Storyboards etc. The only thing different I could think of is that I added a class file in Visual Studio 2012. After the project refreshed the design view went away and all I can see is the xml version of it.

If anyone can show me the solution I would appreciate it as I have searched google and stackoverflow and no answers have been found. I am new to both the language and VS/Blend so this may be a simple fix, I have no idea. Thanks in advance!

Ishikawa
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  • Some things: Can you still see your windows in the Visual Studio 2012 visual editor? If not, there may be a different problem. Also, if you change your project type to console, Blend will refuse to show xaml views. – Surfbutler Aug 26 '12 at 09:20
  • I solved it! I could still see it in visual editor in Visual Studio. I forgot when I was logging something to the console, I temporarily switched output type to Console. I just switched it back and everything works again! Thank you so much. – Ishikawa Aug 26 '12 at 17:11

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Make sure your project type is not set to 'console' as Blend will refuse to show design view for this type. If the project type is 'window', Blend will display design view just fine.

Surfbutler
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Also, Blend for VS2013 will not open a solution file if the target .NET Framework version is set to 4.5.2. A reset of the 'Target Framework' to 4.5.1 (or earlier) and Blend works fine.

AlfredBr
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I managed to solve this thanks to Surfbutler. My problem was I temporarily switched the project (output) type to console in Visual Studio 2012. When I switched it back to Window the design view started working properly again in Blend.

Ishikawa
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  • By the way, why did you switch your project type to console? If it was to get a console window for tracing etc while still being able to display windows, theres a couple of workarounds- one is to simply view your trace on the output window within Visual Studio. Another is to use a third party tool to view output such as from OutputDebugString etc in a Window (theres several of these) even if youre not debugging. Finally you can explicity create a console window and send output to that in the usual way, even if your app is a windows app. Good luck! – Surfbutler Aug 26 '12 at 18:28
  • Yea I wanted to see some debugging output so I started up the console to be able to see it. I will take a look at OutputDebugString for sure. – Ishikawa Aug 26 '12 at 18:44