Microsoft has announced that it has open sourced XAML Studio, a developer tool that can be used to quickly prototype UWP XAML before adding code to Visual Studio.
It provides a number of tools and resources for XAML development, including live editing and interacting, a binding debugger, a data context editor, the ability to auto-save and restore documents, IntelliSense, a documentation toolbox, alignment guides, and namespace helpers.
XAML Studio started in 2017 as a prototype called XamlPad+, which was created during a hackathon to revive a number of past WPF tools. Its first commit was in 2018, at which point the name was changed to XAML Studio.
It last public release was in 2019 with v1.1, and in 2020, the first attempts at open sourcing the project began. Some components of the tool were open sourced individually prior to the full platform being made open source, including the Monaco Editor Wrapper, SwitchPresenter, Sizer controls, Vertical Segmented, Adorners, and SelectedContentControl.
“Open sourcing is a feature! This was a lot of work to get to this point, but we’re super excited to continue this journey with the community of passionate WinUI developers out there,” Michael Hawker, creator of XAML Studio and senior software engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.
XAML Studio will exist under the .NET Foundation as a seed project, and work is continuing on version 2, which may be released later this year, and will also still ship as a Microsoft Store app. According to the maintainers, no new larger tooling features are being planned, but several back-end and refactoring initiatives are underway, and can be read about on the roadmap here.
“XAML Studio v2 has a lot of cool features, but many of them are still experimental and early in their development cycle. We hope to continue improving these experiences and stabilizing the code, especially with some still needed larger changes needed to fully support some of the new experiences as well as WinUI 3,” Hawker wrote.
