Updates on .NET Core Windows Forms designer

Olia Gavrysh

March 17th, 202066 0

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.

.NET Core Windows Forms designer in Visual Studio

This release contains

  • Support for the following controls:

    • FlowLayoutPanel,
    • GroupBox,
    • ImageList,
    • MenuStrip (via the PropertyBrowser and context menu),
    • Panel,
    • SplitContainer,
    • Splitter,
    • TabControl,
    • TableLayoutPanel,
    • ToolStrip (via the PropertyBrowser, context menu and designer actions).

  • Local resources and localized forms were enabled in the designer.

  • Support for LayoutMode and ShowGrid/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.

Enabling .NET Core Windows Forms designer in Visual Studio Settings

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.

Visual Studio Feedback channel

Olia Gavrysh Senior Product Manager, .NET

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66 comments

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  • Bryant Zimmerman 0

    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?

    • Bryant Zimmerman 0

      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?

      • Bryant Zimmerman 0

        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.

  • Ali Hus 0

    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!

  • Peter Sawyer 0

    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…

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