How to manually reload the Visual Studio designer for WPF

Question

Is there any way to force the WPF designer to reload or refresh, without rebuilding the entire project or solution?

If there\'s an error, I get an option in the desi

Answer 1

The Visual Studio designer attempts to keep the rendered view in sync with the XAML. That's the advertised behavior.

• The first thing you should check is that there are no errors in the errors window. It may be something as simple as a missing angle bracket.
• The second thing to check is whether you have any code (other than your code-behind) which needs to be compiled for the designer to render your XAML correctly. This includes any of your own datatypes that you instantiate in XAML, any custom controls you have written (e.g. MyTextBlock derived from TextBlock), or any classes directly or indirectly in support of design-time data. If so, you need to rebuild your project.
• The last thing to check for is possible bugs in the designer. In spite of the advertised behavior, the designer may get out-of-sync due to bugs. In that close, close the XAML window and re-open it. Other tricks that might work are selecting the XAML tab and then the Design tab, or maximizing the XAML pane.

As far as rebuilding your application goes, you don't need to do this as a habit. You only need to recompile it when the above conditions apply. Once they don't apply, you can just edit the XAML. Another way to say this is that if you haven't modified code, you shouldn't need to rebuild (modulo bugs).