.net 6 Windows Forms

[Shelly Takacs]

Forthe last several Visual Studio release cycles, the Windows Forms (WinForms) Team has beenworking hard to bring the WinForms designer for .NET applications to parity withthe .NET Framework designer. As you may be aware, a new WinFormsdesigner was needed to support .NET Core 3.1 applications, and later .NET 5+applications. The work required a near-complete rearchitecting of the designer,as we responded to the differences between .NET and the .NET Framework basedWinForms designer everyone knows and loves. The goal of this blog post is togive you some insight into the new architecture and what sorts of changes wehave made. And of course, how those changes may impact you as you create customcontrols and .NET WinForms applications.

After reading this blog post you will be familiar with the underlying problemsthe new WinForms designer is meant to solve and have a high-level understandingof the primary components in this new approach. Enjoy this look into thedesigner architecture and stay tuned for future blogs!

While we aimed at complete parity between the OOP designer and the .NETFramework designer for the release of Visual Studio 2022,there are still a few issues on our backlog. That said, the OOP designer in its current iterationalready has most of the significant improvements at all important levels:

In addition, a Form with all its controls and components renders itself in the designerat design time. Therefore, the code that instantiates the form and shows it in theDesigner window must also be executed in .NET and not in .NET Framework, so thatnewer properties available only in .NET also reflect the actual appearance andbehavior of the controls, components, and ultimately the entire Form or UserControl.

Because we plan to continue innovating and adding new features in the future,the problem only grows over time. So we had to design a mechanism that supportedsuch cross-framework interactions between the WinForms designer and Visual Studio.

With the knowledge of these new concepts, it is obvious that adjustments toexisting custom control designers targeting .NET will be required. The extent towhich the adjustments are necessary depends purely on how extensively the customcontrol utilize the typical custom Control Designer functionality.

Let us know what topics you would like hear from us around the WinForms Designer-the new Object Data Source functionality in the OOP Designer and the WinForms Designer SDKare the topics already in the making and on top of our list.

Please also note that the WinForms .NET runtime is open source, and you can contribute!If you have ideas, encountered bugs, or even want to take on PRs around the WinForms runtime,have a look at the WinForms Github repo.If you have suggestions around the WinForms Designer,feel free to file new issues there as well.

If you have used preview versions, try to uninstall (all of) those, and reinstall the latest release. If that does not help, please send a bug report over the VS feedback button (upper right corner of VS) or report a bug in the WinForms GitHub repo.

As the main project I work on is all based on DevExpress WinForms components, due to the instability of both WinForms Designer and/or DevExpress, unfortunately we are unable to migrate the project to .net core. I hope see that working smothly as soon as possible.

Same here. We are migrating our backend to .NET 6, but our WinForms frontend is having lots of problems due to the designer not working. Even under .NET Framework we are experimenting some problems. I hope you get all the problems solved!

You can have two project files in the same directory as your WinForms project: the old .csproj file from the existing .NET Framework project and the new SDK-style .csproj file of the new .NET Core WinForms project.

What about modern windows 11 inspired UI elements? We wanted a modern looking designer that has better and fluent UI designer and elements. Please explain when will we see that as, from the looks of it, this thing still looks like windows 7

For the last 3 weeks I have been intensively learning docker and running it locally. It is really great and I love the simple clear commands, and the fact that it just works and diagnostics and errors are generally clear.

Could you please advise that are there any road map items to enable Docker Windows Container to support .NET WinForms C# applications?

I see tremendous values for this usecase with enterprise customers and .net developers to retain existing investments on .NET winforms apps and promotes acceleration for containerizing legacy .net windows applications. Please review and advise!

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