We are working with Windows Presentation Foundation these days, using Visual Studio 2005 but the technology seems to be too new and the tools have some annoying bugs. The new XAML has some good things and some other scary problems you should be aware of. The goog point for me as a developer who has access to the MS tools is that you can design your application as a desktop one with a rich developer experience but giving the application a web appearance.
XAML is not surprising for me because Glade has been separating code and presentation layers using XML since long time ago, and the Stetic engine is wonderful but the integration of the desktop and the web under Windows environments with WPF is very attractive for developers.
Anyway this post is intended for showing some bugs at the Cider plugin for Visual Studio which are really annoying:
- When trying to build : Error 9 Unable to copy file
to <./path/X.dll>. The process cannot access the file X it is being used by another process. - Editing and building XAML: Could not find schema information for the attribute X
- Editing and building XAML: The element X has invalid child element Y in namespace Z. List of possible elements expected
- Again: The tag X does not exist in XML namespace X
The solution is to close all the files you have opened in your current solution, close VS and open it again, trying to rebuild
before open any file. Some times you may be using some wpf control that is in a different assembly than another control and the second one depends on the first. In that case you need to rebuild the dependent assembly first when you change it as you may know.
Anyway the VS XAML designer is not very cool, I find better the MS Expression Blend even though the Blend designer doesn’t have intellisense for manual xml edition. A good solution cold be to edit the .xaml files at MS Blend and to edit the .xaml.cs files at VS, sharing the project solution file for both programs.
I dindn’t know these issues were bugs but fortunately Alex told me that 😉
If this technology was open source we cold go through the code to find out the bugs and fix them but this time, we have to wait for MS to release a new version 🙁
Update: Arrrrrggghhhh!!!!!. MS Expression Blend and VS wpf designer are both awful !!!!!!!Â