How do I install XamlPad?

Question

This is going to sound silly, because everyone seems to take it for granted that XamlPad is just there, including the MSDN article about XamlPad.

But I've installed Visual Studio 2008, which AFAIK installs the .NET 3.5 SDK (how could it not?), which is supposed to include XamlPad. But there is no XamlPad.exe in my Start Menu or anywhere on my PC. I've even done a dir /s xamlpad.exe from the command line, to make sure the problem isn't with the Windows Indexing Service not seeing what's in front of its face like usual. No dice.

I'd like to demo some XAML to my co-workers, but I don't want to use the godawful XAML designer in Visual Studio if I can help it. How do I get a copy of XamlPad to install onto my PC?

I'm running Vista 64-bit if that makes any difference (it shouldn't, but you never can tell).

Answer 1

You can download XamlPadX 4.0 from here.

Answer 2

At the bottom of the MSDN page there's this comment:

The Start Menu shortcut is not installed by VS2008

The program binary is installed however in Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin

I've just checked on my machine and it's there.

There's also a link on that MSDN page to the new version on the author's blog.

Answer 3

Kaxaml is a good alternative for XAMLPad, or even a good replacement for it.

Answer 4

I was looking for a lighter weight editor than VisStudio2008. Unfortunately, both Kaxaml and XamlPadX are limited in that they won't render xaml that has events specified. (For example, in my element, Kaxaml chokes on this: Loaded="Window_Loaded".) That's a pretty big limitation... What am I missing?

Even worse, Kaxaml has trouble with xaml created by VisStudio2008. In my app.xaml, I get the error: "Cannot create more than one System.Windows.Application instance in the same AppDomain."

In another xaml file, on this line: Window x:Class=

I get this message: 'Class' attribute does not exist in XML namespace "http://schemas..snip..." namespace.

Are these limitations of Kaxaml, or user error?

Answer 5

You are correct, both XamlpadX and Kaxaml do not support events (where would be the handler?) or class references (there is no code-behind).

You may be missing the purpose of these editors - they are very useful when dealing with 'pure' xaml - figuring out styles, templates and the like, outside of a large project / solution. Once complete to your satisfaction you incorporate your XAML back into the project.