If you work with XAML day in and day out then surely you will have your own tips/tricks for working inside of Visual Studio 2010. Here are mine. I hope that you find them useful.
Tip #1
When Double Clicking on a .XAML File go directly to the XAML View and collapse the Design split view.
I find it annoying how the design view opens up every time you double click on a .XAML file. I like to create my UI inside of Expression Blend instead of Visual Studio. For instance, I get the following screen when I double click on a .XAML file inside of WP7 Project inside of Visual Studio 2010.
This is annoying because it takes time to render the design view and even load items from the toolbox. Let’s change this to where it just loads the XAML file and if we need to see the designer inside of Visual Studio then we can easily do so.
Inside of Visual Studio 2010… Go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > XAML > Miscellaneous and put a check in “Always open documents in full Xaml View”.
Tip #2
Improve readability of XAML inside of Visual Studio 2010.
Here is the default view of a XAML page inside of Visual Studio 2010. It is very annoying that you have to scroll to see all of the properties of the buttons. Even with that, the properties are spaced so close together that you look at each line for a few seconds in order to find the property that you want.
Read more: Michael Crump