JetBrains Rider C# | Windows Form UI [closed]

Answer 1

As others have already told Rider has NOT windows forms designer. And moreover there is no plans to implement it.

But Rider has powerful xaml support (a markup language for WPF) and we are going to release a first version of WPF controls previewer later (probably even this year). So we are focusing on improving experience for WPF and Xamarin developers.

Answer 2

I'm not using Rider myself, but quickly browsing for its current state on UI designers, it doesn't seem to have any, especially not for Windows Forms / WinForms. It would only let you create a UI by writing the code for setting up the windows and controls manually.

Given that WinForms has not been under any serious development since more than a decade now by Microsoft itself and that it's a "dead" technology nowadays with WPF / UWP being the new "technology to use" on the Windows platform, it's doubtful JetBrains will ever care about implementing something like a designer for WinForms in their Java-based IDE, if it's possible at all.

If you really want to develop WinForms applications, you should go for Visual Studio. It has the best designer for it out there IMHO, and even that one is horrible. The "best" you could do is to design only the WinForms Forms and Controls in Visual Studio Community 2017 (which is free), and write the remaining code in Rider, copying over the designed Form or Control classes or creating a project/solution sharing folders.

It does not look like Rider supports designers for any other Windows / Microsoft technology like WPF / UWP aswell. WPF does have a more code-friendly approach to generate a user interface with declarative XAML, but the missing IDE support for generating the code-behind and unavailable IntelliSense support could make make that a frustrating if not impossible task.

A third party, cross-platform UI framework based on NuGet packages and .NET Core could be Avalonia. The project tries to recreate WPF from scratch with open source implementations. It also only offers an extension for Visual Studio for a visual designer, but as with WPF, the UI can be written in XAML, and loading it is done more transparently with a few manual lines of code, which seems more doable if you're missing first-class IDE support.

Answer 3

Q: Are you also developing a GUI designer like in Visual Studio for WinForms, WPF etc? A: Yes, we’re looking at how we can support at least previewing WinForms/WPF/Xamarin Forms. We’re not sure we’re going to make it for the first release though.

JetBrains already published the answer,

https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2016/11/28/introducing-rider-the-new-net-ide-webinar-recording-and-qa/

Generally speaking, they can easily support that on Windows (as open source IDE SharpDevelop already supports that). But it would be a less useful feature as Rider targets cross platform developers.