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Is there a way to disable the WPF designer (the preview pane, I only need the XAML-pane with intellisense) in VS 2010?

Please note that when hiding the Design view of the WPF designer, it will still render the form/control ... I don't consider that disabled.

I only see the "Open With" + "XML Editor"-solution, which doesn't give nearly the fidelity the default XAML designer has.

Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com
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    In case you miss my comment on one of the answers, try setting it to open with "Source Code (Text) Editor". You should get the better intellisense experience that way. – Noah Richards Jul 25 '10 at 17:12
  • @Noah +1 (actually +2), thanks. Since the editor behaves as sluggish as with the designer enabled (at least on my machine), I suppose there is no way to make it quicker:S –  Jul 25 '10 at 18:04

4 Answers4

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I don't know about 2010, but in 2008 you can Tools->Options->Text Editor->XAML->MIscellaneous->"Always open documents in full XAML view"

Maybe this helps.

Nils
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  • +1, nice hint, but same behavior as hiding the Designer Pane. –  Jul 25 '10 at 16:03
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    The main issue with the XAML designer is that it is incomplete and crawls visual studio. The closest solution is to right click a xaml file and select 'Open with...' and then set the default at 'Source Code (Text) Editor'... unfortunately this seems to reset itself after a while, so you need to keep re-applying it. – Stefan Z Camilleri Aug 02 '11 at 12:51
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    See [this link](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1211820/how-can-i-disable-the-design-mode-in-visualstudio-options/3533466#3533466) for VS 2015 – mt_serg Aug 17 '15 at 07:48
  • Works with VS 2010 as described. – helb Sep 09 '15 at 07:08
  • In 2019, the option is Tools -> Options -> XAML Designer. Just disable it. – Mark Bonafe Mar 24 '22 at 18:28
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I haven't tried this in Visual Studio 2010, but in 2008 you can have it treat XAML files as XML files (and thus use the standard XML text editor, rather than the designer's XML editor). You can do this by right clicking an XAML file, select "Open With", pick XML file from the list, and then set that as the default.

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

Andy
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  • Good hint, I mentioned it in the question, but for WPF you lose _a lot_ of fidelity. The intellisense for WPF-XAML is pretty darn good (it's amazing) - for example, it also includes recognition of CLR types in XML. I suppose that's what makes it so slow:S –  Jul 25 '10 at 16:58
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    Don't set it to XML, set it to "Source Code (Text) Editor". You should get the better intellisense experience that way. – Noah Richards Jul 25 '10 at 17:10
  • @Noah, Andy: Thanks! This was more helpful that the accepted answer. – Robin Maben Feb 08 '11 at 06:13
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Try turning off "Automatically Populate Toolbox" in addition to Open in XAML View (it's on the same dialog). This seems to really improve the performance as well.

Steven Pena
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0

I finally ended using a quite pragmatic approach for that problem. Tested with VS 2012, but should be the same for 2010 or 2013. Note that I do have some simpler WPF-forms where I want to have the Designer - but not for the complex ones, where it is super-slow and partly not working anyway. In this case I fire up following batch script:

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