Microsoft has announced the availability of Windows Forms designer for .NET Core projects. In a blog post, the company says the tool is available for Visual Studio 2019 version 16.6 and is currently in preview. Furthermore, an updated version of the designer is included in the Visual Studio 16.7 Preview 1 release.
Customers will find Windows Forms are turned off by default. To activate them, head to Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features.
If you’re unfamiliar with Windows Forms, it is an open source solution framework for building applications in Windows 10. Microsoft has been working on bringing the tool to dotnet for some time. The company says a full integration is close, but development continues in preview to get functionality and performance just right.
Details
The designer is an extensive package. In its blog post, Microsoft explains what’s available in the tool:
- All Windows Forms controls except DataGridView and ToolStripContainer (these are coming soon)
- UserControl and custom controls infrastructure (only available since Visual Studio 16.7 Preview 1 version)
- All designer functionality, such as
- drag-and-drop
- selection, move and resize
- cut/copy/paste/delete
- integration with Properties Window
- events generation and so on
- New WebView2 controlThis chromium-based embedded browser control allows to render web content (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) for .NET apps. It is supported in both .NET Core and .NET Framework platforms for Windows Forms and WPF applications. You can find a getting started tutorial in the Microsoft documentation and we will publish a blog post dedicated to WebView2 control in the nearest future.
- Local resources
- Partial support for localization
- Localizable properties of the controls and UserControl can be serialized into ResX-files (by setting Localizable property to true).
- Different languages are supported via changing Language property.
- Additional Cultures are added in the preview of .NET 5 according to the International Components for Unicode Standard (ICU).
Users of Visual Studio 2019 version 16.6 and Visual Studio 16.7 Preview 1 can start using WinForms now. You can check out the open source solution at GitHub here.
