Blend and content files

[Evan Lang]

Hi everyone,

 

I have an interesting problem I’ve been wrestling with WRT Blend, for anyone intimately familiar with it.  I learned recently that the way Blend works under the hood is it compiles your project to a temporary assembly, then loads that assembly so it’s content displays properly in the editor.

 

What blindsided me was that Blend compiles this assembly to a temporary folder, all by itself. No content files get carried with it. So I found that when my project was loaded into Blend, we’d get a FileNotFound exception and the XAML files wouldn’t display. What is apparently unique about my project is that the content files are central to the designer’s ability to do what he does, so the usual design-time data tricks won’t apply. The content is simply too large to comfortably add to the assembly as an embedded resource (~500MB in some cases), so that won’t work either. What it boils down to is, how on earth do I find my content files at design time?

 

I am encouraged by the fact that MediaElement shows the first frame of a source video you bind to it, proving that it is at least possible (though it may require using reflection to make calls to internal MSFT APIs). Does anyone have any idea how it’s done?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

 

P.S. If you’re curious about what circumstances led to this situation, I have a custom 3D rendering engine built that integrates directly into WPF and is vastly more powerful than WPF’s own 3D API. For some projects, the textures and 3D objects combine to over 500 MB of data.  What I’m trying to do is develop a system that will allow a designer to wire up an interaction model and overlay UI for it in Blend. In order to do this though, they need the real content, not separate design-time content, visible in the designer.

 

 

Evan Lang / Director, Experimental UX

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