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XAML Form Viewer and Editor

By Jonathan Wood posted 03-09-2023 08:50

  

Last year in November of 2022, I released the first version of "XAML Form Viewer and Editor" on the Microsoft store which can be downloaded from here:

XAML Form Viewer and Editor

I then began the process of a designer to go with the viewer and editor, this process is taking a bit longer than expected for a few reasons, all of the forms that can be created for IR can contain other controls with children, such as calendar controls, tabbed controls, drop down lists, etc.  When creating the designer, to give the user the ability to have drag and drop, I have to use a "Canvas" as the parent element that everything will sit on.

I do have a working prototype of the designer, but at the moment it doesn't support changing the design of those controls and the conversion from a grid to a canvas doesn't work smoothly so that is one of the major milestones I am currently working through.

So far, the designer works on the simpler controls such as labels, text blocks, text box's, rich text box, graphic elements such as ellipses etc, and it can load in every currently designed form even if they have the complex controls, they just can't be manipulated just yet.  Some additional features I am toying around with is to allow exporting out the XAML form as an HTML document and possibly add in open office document format so that I can convert the XAML form into an office document, some controls would not be supported through when converted, so they would have to be translated into another format, such as taking a tab control which at current I can't take into a word document, but instead read the tab and make the tab element its own page in the word document.

That or convert the whole thing into Excel format, one of the two.  Haven't fully drawn out the plans for the converter yet.

I will create a video later of the working prototype of the editor and post to this blog with updates as I progress with this project.

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12-16-2024 11:17

It has been a while since I posted any updates to the published application however, you would be happy to know that I am now working on a PDF converter built right into the program which I hope to finish first quarter of next year. It works on simple XAML forms but I want it to also work on the tab sections and advanced controls. It will be an update to this program so of course it will still be free to use. I have also embeded the initial template code into it so you can click on Design XAML in the program and click on New and it will be a ready made template just need to slap in the controls, for now I have limited it to label and textbox in my designer, trying to get drag and drop controls to work so you can move the controls around, snap to grid and do other things, but I will work on all that after the PDF export is ready and published.