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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the easiest way. The tragedy is that this explicitly rejects all the subsequent developments since WPF - UWP, WinUI3 - because they don't work nearly as well.

If you want an installer BTW, use "Wix".

If you are eligible for VS Community, do give it a go: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ since that has the WPF designer in (the WinUI3 designer is inexcusably broken)

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> the WinUI3 designer is inexcusably broken

I just tried VS2022, and the UI designer for WinUI3 is completely non-functional? What is the recommended approach to lay out the UI pages these days?

Realistically you have three options:

- ignore Winui3 and do it in WPF (fewer controls, deprecated, actually works)

- do it blind in XAML, possibly with the aid of a piece of paper. Or the "live view" in VS if that works. (Live View is the suggestion given on the github issue for "designer doesn't work", fwiw)

- do it in the UWP designer, then s/Windows/Microsoft/ in the control namespaces

holy shit

Exactly. And then people wonder why everything is electron nowadays. Native UI development on any platform is pure garbage compared to frameworks in Web frontend.

I hope SwiftUI and flutter will be able to make it at least a little bit better.

That's what i really love about the MS ecosystem. There are actually 3 ways to achieve a task, but none of it works fully end-to-end.

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