It's now been a while since the WPF Designer was split out into a separate repository of its own (early October of 2015 to be precise). It still looks & feels the same as before, however there have been quite a few changes, new features, and, as always, bug fixes. It ships on NuGet.
One very important change is "buried" in our CONTRIBUTING.md - we undertook the work to get rid of third-party UI component assembly dependencies (and we want to keep it that way). That meant writing our own property editors, but it allows us to add/edit just about any XAML control. And additionally, no more version clashes for you, because we ship with zero dependencies!
Now for an assorted list of news in the designer:
- XAML2009 support (partially, not all is yet supported, eg x.TypeArguments)
- Support for parsing app.xaml and resources defined in there!
- Implement DesignWidth/DesignHeight support
- Support for x:Reference
- Support for Styles and ControlTemplates
- Pressing "ALT" while clicking on a control allows the selection of a control below
- Remove dependency to Extended.Wpf.Toolkit, now projects which use these assemblies can be designed
- Performance fixes: outline node was really slow on big XAML pages
- Formatted text editor: you can edit a Textblock via inline editor and style the text (Bold, Italic, Font,...)
- Snapline fixes (now also middle of control has a Snapline, and you can snap to elements in other containers)
- Namescope fixes, copy&paste fixes,... the prefix of the XAML element is not lost any more (no "d1p1" in XAML)
- Better assembly loading support
- Many new context menus
- Same context menu for Outline and Designer
- XAML parser fixes
- Editor for formatted text in a TextBlock
- Support of loading Files from relative URIs
- Copy/Paste of Bindings uses copied controls
The WPF Designer has been merged for the current SharpDevelop 5.1 builds on the build server. Please give it a thorough test drive!
It took a little longer (especially the "no third parties" part) than planned, but we hope that you have now a much more useful experience. If you are looking for examples on how to use the designer in your own projects: there are two samples in the repository, and of course there is always SharpDevelop to look at.