Disable the WPF designer in VS 2010?

Question

Is there a way to disable the WPF designer (the preview pane, I only need the XAML-pane with intellisense) in VS 2010?

Please note that when hiding the Design v

Answer 1

Try turning off "Automatically Populate Toolbox" in addition to Open in XAML View (it's on the same dialog). This seems to really improve the performance as well.

Answer 2

I don't know about 2010, but in 2008 you can Tools->Options->Text Editor->XAML->MIscellaneous->"Always open documents in full XAML view"

Maybe this helps.

Answer 3

I finally ended using a quite pragmatic approach for that problem. Tested with VS 2012, but should be the same for 2010 or 2013. Note that I do have some simpler WPF-forms where I want to have the Designer - but not for the complex ones, where it is super-slow and partly not working anyway. In this case I fire up following batch script:

:loop
taskkill /F /IM XDesProc.exe
timeout /t 10 /nobreak
goto loop

Answer 4

I haven't tried this in Visual Studio 2010, but in 2008 you can have it treat XAML files as XML files (and thus use the standard XML text editor, rather than the designer's XML editor). You can do this by right clicking an XAML file, select "Open With", pick XML file from the list, and then set that as the default.

At least in 2008, you still got pretty good intellisense, but none of the overhead of the XAML designer.