A simple Xamlpad for Metro / Windows 8
What
MetroXamlpad is a design & development utility for Windows 8. It is a simple, split view text editor that parses its document contents as Xaml and displays the result, either as a valid visual tree of UIElements or an error. It’s typically used as a quick way to render Xaml in an isolated environment, usually to debug/test styles and layouts.
Why
Sketching, prototyping, and debugging visual concerns can sometimes be difficult, especially on new platforms. In many cases the key is to minimize the time between authoring changes and seeing them in action. In other words, fail quickly.
Many variations of this tool exist, my favorite being KaXaml, but right now none of these support WinRT. What’s worse, the Blend 5 Developer Preview doesn’t support Xaml either! The Visual Studio designer supports rendering Xaml at design time, but it lacks many of the productivity features Blend for WPF & Silverlight has to aid and enrich building an app with full design time support.
To help iterate quickly and fill the tooling void, I decided to make a simple version of this utility.
How
It’s actually a trivial app to write. All Xaml frameworks to date, including WinRT, support parsing Xaml into visuals at runtime, in the form of XamlReader.Load(). This is the bulk of what a Xamlpad app needs to accomplish; what remains is simply user interface conveniences or productivity features.
Xaml http://gist.github.com/1593622
C# http://gist.github.com/1593623
Cheers!
