Uno Platform Studio Brings a Visual Designer to Cross-Platform .NET Apps

Uno Platform today announced its new Uno Platform Studio with Hot Design, a visual designer for cross-platform .NET apps that offers a modern take on popular WYSIWYG designers of the past, like Visual Basic 6.0 and Borland Delphi.

“Uno Platform Studio is a suite of productivity tools featuring Hot Design, a next-generation Visual Designer for .NET cross-platform apps,” the Uno Platform team writes in the announcement post. “To make every developer as productive as possible, Uno Platform Studio aids developers through the various parts of the development lifecycle, from design handoff to continuously designing and building the app.”

Uno Platform Studio is an attempt to address a long list of limitations in the developer tools, app previewers, and legacy designers that developers struggle with today. It offers a runtime visual designer that works in real time, so you can change an app without restarting it.

Three are three core components to this solution:  The Hot Design visual designer, Hot Reload for seeing changes without restarting the app during development, and a Figma plug-in that exports an app design to XAML or C# markup. Hot Design works with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Rider on Windows, Mac, or Linux (as available), and changes made in the visual designers are reflected immediately in the underlying XAML code. It supports user-created components and live data sources, and because it’s not dependent on a state management pattern, it works with both MVVM and MVUX patterns.

Developers interested in Uno Platform Studio can join a waitlist to get beta access. Uno will provide a live demo of this tool on the .NET Conf live stream today at 5:00 pm ET/2:00 pm PT, and if you miss that, you can watch it on replay.