A prototype WPF/Silverlight layout designer

I’ve been thinking recently about how would I write a WPF UI designer that would specifically highlight the new WPF layout paradigm, and not try to mimic the old WinForms paradigm. The old VB6/WinForms designer was built around absolute positioning. It allowed for rapid WYSIWYG prototyping of interfaces, and the Dock/Anchor functionality provided a relatively cheap and easy support for scalable UI. The new WPF designer in Visual Studio is although very powerful, but some people find it difficult to quickly draft a scalable UI that produces clean XAML.

So I wrote a concept prototype of how I would like to design WPF UI:

https://layout.osenkov.com

It runs right in the browser and requires Silverlight 4 (because it needs to copy the output XAML to clipboard). It only focuses on the basics and doesn’t have a lot of features (it’s just a prototype), but I think it can nicely convey my ideas. Nothing of it is new, and both Blend and VS designers support complex layouts with panels and such, but I still decided to write a simple designer without a lot of complex details.

Let me know what you think!

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