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Opening your existing Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) projects in the new July CTP

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I'm very, very surprised that you can't find this documented in the blogs of anyone one the Windows Presentation Foundation team, so here's the tip:

If you have existing Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) projects, and try to open those in Visual Studio on a machine that has the July CTP of the .NET Framework 3 installed, Visual Studio may refuse to load them. The immediate cause of the problem is that the July CTP does not include the Visual Studio Enhancements for the .NET Framework 3. 

The workaround is this: find a WPF project among the SDK samples (I used the ColorPicker sample for a dll project, and the UsingImageBrush sample for an exe project), open the .csproj file in Notepad, and copy all of the PropertyGroup elements from the sample project file and paste those over all of the PropertyGroup elements in your original project file. 

Development goes faster because you don't have that Orcas designer taking about 30 seconds to say, "Whoops!" every time you try to edit your XAML files :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2006
    A better solution is to instal Orcas in VS using the misexec override:

    msiexec /i vsextwfx.msi WRC_INSTALLED_OVERRIDE=1

    The override bypasses the installation version checking so you can install the extensions.

    After this you have July CTP installed and Orcas from the previous version. This works just fine.

    To solve your problem with the Orcas designer trying to open:

    Right click on a .xaml file in your solution and choose "open with...". Choose "xml Editor" and click on "Set as default". Now all .xaml files will open with the xml editor instead of trying to open the unfinished Orcas designer.

    Why do you want to do this, you ask? Well if you do have Orcas installed in VS you get all the templates and the functionality that VS recognizes what the heck a .xaml file is and so on.

    All in all a better solution in my book.
  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2006
    I agree!  Thank you!  I recommend posting this solution in the vicinity of Lauren Lavoie's blog and the links off that, where issues relating to the July CTP install are being discussed, and which have been noticed by the search engines.  
  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2006
    Another thing you may try out - to get out of all the Cider "Whoopses", is to right click on a XAML file in the Solution Explorer and choosing Open with…->XML Editor. Presto!