We released a preview version of Visual Studio 16.6 – Visual Studio 2019 version 16.6 Preview 1 and with it a new version of .NET Core Windows Forms designer.
This release contains
-
Support for the following controls:
FlowLayoutPanel
,GroupBox
,ImageList
,MenuStrip
(via thePropertyBrowser
and context menu),Panel
,SplitContainer
,Splitter
,TabControl
,TableLayoutPanel
,ToolStrip
(via thePropertyBrowser
, context menu and designer actions).
-
Local resources and localized forms were enabled in the designer.
-
Support for
LayoutMode
andShowGrid/SnapToGrid
settings via Tools->Options. -
Reliability and performance improvements.
-
Other minor fixes and tweaks.
Coming next
In the future releases we will be working on User Controls
and third-party controls support, integration with popular controls vendors, support for Data Controls and related scenarios, performance improvements and other features.
How to use the designer
- You need to use Visual Studio Preview channel
- You need to enable the designer in Visual Studio. Go to Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features and select the Use the preview Windows Forms designer for .NET Core apps option.
How to report issues
Your feedback is important to us! Please report issues and send feature requests via the Visual Studio Feedback channel. Use the “Send Feedback” icon in Visual Studio top-right corner as shown below and specify that it is related to the “WinForms .NET Core” area.
Any ETA on stable version that will support user controls? Am still using the 2 project hack which from initial understandings in the last quarter of 2019, Jan 2020 was hoping to be the target release date.
Patiently waiting…
Any plans to support Abstract and/or Generics when it comes to UserControls? I have found TypeDescriptionProvider to be quite temperamental (I’ve been using the workaround described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6817107/abstract-usercontrol-inheritance-in-visual-studio-designer )
Thank you, this will be very useful for our company since we have upgraded to .NetCore 3.1 for WinForms recently. Though, we have custom controls as base forms instead of just system Forms and this preview doesn’t work for us. Hope third party user control support comes soon!
Is 16.6.0 still preview? It was not listed as such.
Why is the new winforms designer still missing the button control. How hard is it to make a working button control.
At what point will this settle down and become usable? It is beyond frustrating to try to actually use the new winforms designer and have it going dead in one version and active in another only to find that it still is not usable.
I know that a lot of work is going into this to make it work, but when will there be an actual usable stable version?
Is drag and drop functional. I am trying to code it and it looks like it is not there?
Also is there discussion forum somewhere for the winforms designer?
My apologizes for my frustration in my posts. I did not realize that the winforms was still officially Beta preview. I am hopeful that once it is completed it will have all the basics there. I still do a lot of winform development and am excited to move that codebase to .net Core. all of our API and web is using .net core I look forward to the day when we can use core for everything. Dev team thank you for your work.
Hey Olia,
it’s a pleasure to see the forms designer support on the actual 16.6 Release.
I’m looking forward for the support of third party controls (also user controls) especially from DevExpress folks.
At the moment we’re lagging in our transformation process to make our apps available with Net Core 🙁
Remember Visual Studio 6.0 – oh my gosh – what a big step in development since that time. Thanks a lot !!!
WinForms designer for .NET Core doesn’t work at all for me. I create a new WinForms for .NET Core app. The designer doesn’t show. I am using VS Community 2019 16.5.5. I don’t see any error dialogs. Can I somehow see IDE errors somewhere?
Same Question here. I use 16.5.4, just added a .Net Code WinForm Project and was wondering, why it is only showing code when I try to switch to the designer view. Took me some minutes on Google to find this blog post :-).
I now understand the background and appreaciate your work on this! One suggestion: Please let Visual Studio show a little info dialog, that the designer is not yet available. Preferable with a link to this post on the dialog. Much better user experience this way.
Time flies. Now it's May 14th. I updated my Visual Studio 2019 to version 16.5.5 yesterday, and I found that the [Design] window can be opened!!! BUT, when I tried to open the solution again after I closed it, the [Design] window never showed again... Both two tab windows are the cs code, no Designer again. I believe that the developers under this blog just hope to get a link to download the designer. We don't want to download a new version of Visual Studio cause it will take a long time and large disk space. If v16.5.5 is not...
Hi, Olivia! I'm getting a little late here. I would like to ask you if there is a possibility that the TableLayoutPanel control comes to support visual inheritance. It is extremely interesting to be able to make base forms, with a generic layout, that can be specialized through inheritance. Currently in the company where I work we use this modality through a trick. In a typical scenario for us, we have forms for CRUD operations that are exactly the same in much of their aesthetics and behavior, and only the controls specific to the treated entity change. On the internet...
Absolutely freaking useless. Hows about a download link that works.
It is beyond absurd the amount of time I have spent trying to track down this issue, and how the heck to get this package, only to not be able to find a single freaking working link.
Hi, am loving NET 5 and WinForms, I am going to port some user controls as SOON AS you include this ability! Can you give any kind of ball park guesstimate of when that preview will be available? I know we’re on Preview 5 now. Thanks for all of your great work!