Turning off Cider

Thursday, June 11 2009 - , , ,

If you work with Silverlight a lot like I do, you might be frustrated with the time it takes Visual Studio to try to render the preview of your Silverlight Views. This can be a painful process, especially when the View gets more complicated … because sometimes Visual Studio cannot even display the preview. Also, whenever the XAML page is opened in Visual Studio, it takes a while to "try" to display the View in preview mode.

There really is no value in the preview mode (aka Cider) with Silverlight and Visual Studio 2008, so I prefer to turn it off in Visual Studio and just use Blend to design the View. If you turn off Cider in Visual Studio, you can still edit the XAML in Visual Studio, but without the hassle of waiting for the preview to try to render. To do this follow these steps:

  1. Go to Visual Studio's Tools menu
  2. Choose Options
  3. Choose Text Editor
  4. Choose XAML
  5. Choose Miscellaneous
  6. Check the box shown below that says "Always open documents in full XAML view"
  7. Click OK

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7 comment(s)

Turning off Cider | Silverlight Coder wrote on Thursday, June 11 2009

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Matt Casto wrote on Thursday, June 11 2009

You can also open XAML files with the XML editor by selecting "Open With..." in the Solution Explorer. However, that editor uses a different xsd for intellisense, so it doesn't act the same.

I've done this before while working with WPF because it seemed the designer was still slowing things down, even though I was opening documents in full XAML view.

Alex Sarafian wrote on Friday, June 12 2009

I did something else.

On any who's designer you do not want to wait or you do not like, you can right click->Open With and choose the simple editor with unicode and instruct to do so every time.

Now if you want the designer just click on the icon or the menu item on the context menu.

How to turn off Visual Studio preview mode for XAML views wrote on Monday, June 15 2009

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tiffany wrote on Thursday, July 09 2009

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web hosting wrote on Saturday, September 05 2009

That is a nice tip and i will try yours and alex idea to see how they both work. I hate waiting for previews and any way to speed things up is fine by me.

internet marketing Melbourne wrote on Monday, September 07 2009

sweet.

thanks for this- have printed this one out.