Invisible Add-In Support in Blend June Preview
+ Robby’s XAML Intellisense code from KAXAML
+ Stefan‘s great work
= Awesome.
+1 to excitement about add-in support for Blend in latest Preview
+1 to observations that the WPF designer in VS2008 is uncomfortably slow
+1 to also wanting C#/VB.NET Intellisense in Blend, to reduce VS2008/Blend context switching
(And no I don’t care that I’m not supposed to want C# Intellisense in Blend because apparently only designers and “dev-igners” use Blend… [a] devs use (and value) Blend too and [b] I find designers are not intimidated by getting their feet wet with C#, and believe me, making designers install VS2008 Express Edition just so they can be handheld through writing a custom converter is WAY more intimidating to them than having C# AutoComplete in Blend.)
(Although I appreciate it is a significant technical challenge to get code Intellisense robustly implemented in Blend.)
Possibly Related Articles (possibly not):
Designers with Expression Blend skills are in demand
Enabling VisualStateManager support for WPF in Expression Blend
WPF Developer Tools I Can’t Code Without
Posted Aug 5th, 2008
into Developer
with tags Expression Blend
This is great news!! I hadn’t seen this yet, thanks for the pointer, Rob!
Now all I need is for my favorite vi plug-in company (http://www.viemu.com/) to make an Expression vi emulator and I’m set!
Yeah – this is cool stuff! And Add-In support is not only for Blend 2.5 – You have some Add-In support in Blend 2 and Design 2 (you can even load some of the same add ins in both Blend and Design!).
Check out http://blog.nukeation.com/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/nukeationMachineforBlend_126A8/Blender1_2.jpg and http://machine.nukeation.com for examples of some Blend extensions.
He claims to have the add-in running all the way back to Blend 1.
I’m currently looking into the add-in API and have a couple of ideas of things to build