[Feature] Visual Studio Extension

[Hefaistos68]

Problem

Currently no support in Visual studio

Proposed solution

Visual Studio 2022/2026 should be supported with a visual preview (Editor even, maybe?)

Alternatives considered

No response

Additional context

No response

Confirmation

• I have searched existing issues and specs for prior discussion of this idea.

[Hefaistos68]

I would be willing to volunteer.

[lextm]

Yes, that's an interesting feature to implement in VS, and you have examples to get started with if you search.

[Hefaistos68]

I made already a few extensions, let me look into it. Should not be too hard.

[dotMorten]

@Hefaistos68 Since reactor is all C#, and VS already supports C#, it does have an editor? If you refer to a visual designer, personally I find hot reload works much better than XAML's hot reload ever did, so IMHO it's a much better alternative to an actual design surface.

[Hefaistos68]

Yes of course I am talking about a visualizer and editor like the xaml visualizer.

[saint4eva]

@Hefaistos68, I believe you meant a previewer in VS, if am not mistaken?

[dotMorten]

Are there any examples of a designer for any of the other DSL languages like React, Swift UI, Kotlin etc? I'm a little confused how that would work, and how good the C# generated from a designer would be. It was hard enough for a designer to generate good XAML - seems like an even harder problem to generate good C#, but would love to be proven wrong.
Have you tried using hot-reload to build up your reactor UI instead?

[Hefaistos68]

@Hefaistos68, I believe you meant a previewer in VS, if am not mistaken?

Actually not, I meant a visualizer, not necessarily live preview but code based. More work, definitely.

[Hefaistos68]

Have you tried using hot-reload to build up your reactor UI instead?

I implemented a basic preview that connects to the running app already but doesn't seem enough.

[Hefaistos68]

Initial testing with preview directly from code, instead of live-preview from the running application. Still a lot to do.

[codemonkeychris]

Super curious about how you got this going? are you hosting the WinUI inside of VS? there is the screenshot service in the devtools, which I used for a really basic live preview... we also have the ability to start up the app with a specific component as the root when you are in devtools mode (so you can force the app to run a single component instead of the normal app)...

[Hefaistos68]

Basically just translating C# into HTML using roslyn to evaluate the code with a fallback for incomplete code.
Still a long way to go, but looks like a good start.
Also having a component toolwindow, similar to the winform toolbox, with all standard reactor components and any custom components. Next step making this draggable into the code window.

[codemonkeychris]

The HTML port seems slick. The VS-Code extension we did used the 10fps image server in devtools to give you a non-interactive preview.

I'm going to try hosting the WinUI components... spec to try is here: https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-reactor/blob/main/docs/specs/056-visual-studio-embedded-preview.md

I tried a quick cross process HWND parenting into a WinForms app to test it... we will see how it works in actual VS next... fun!

[lextm]

@codemonkeychris Maybe reuse some existing code for WPF from VS? I think literally the things are just similar.