Is it possible to disable entirely the designer in vs studio?

[Doraku]

Hello, I'm wondering if there's any way to disable completely the avalonia designer comming with the visual studio extension (while still having the intellisense completion)? I've never held the old wpf xaml designer in my heart and work perfectly with raw xaml, a habit I have carried with me on avalonia. I may be in the minority but seeing the error on top of the xaml editor for something I don't use because I have not added the special BuildAvaloniaApp method (because I'm using a custom initialization to support async run with a splashscreen display) or because some of my views have injected logger or other stuffs just rubs me the wrong way (and I guess it still eat some resources). Having a small option like for wpf designer would be greatly appreciated :)

[LaurentInSeattle]

In VS2022 : You can "untoggle" the Split view button and then click on the XAML button.
Then you have only the XAML in view.

[Doraku]

Yeah you can set it to only view the code, but you still get error as if it was trying to run the designer in the background

23:27:26.599 [Information]  Starting previewer process for '"D:\Projects\DefaultEngine\DummyGame.Editor\bin\Debug\net9.0\DummyGame.Editor.dll"'
23:27:26.599 [Information] 10000 Started previewer process for '"D:\Projects\DefaultEngine\DummyGame.Editor\bin\Debug\net9.0\DummyGame.Editor.dll"'. Waiting for connection to be initialized.
23:27:28.340 [Information] 10000 Connection initialized
23:27:28.429 [Error] 10000 <= "Unhandled exception. System.InvalidOperationException: Unable to create AppBuilder from type \"DummyGame.Editor.Program\". Input type either needs to have BuildAvaloniaApp -> AppBuilder method or inherit Application type."
23:27:28.429 [Error] 10000 <= "   at Avalonia.AppBuilder.Configure(Type entryPointType)"
23:27:28.429 [Error] 10000 <= "   at Avalonia.DesignerSupport.Remote.RemoteDesignerEntryPoint.Main(String[] cmdline)"
23:27:28.429 [Error] 10000 <= "   at Avalonia.Designer.HostApp.Program.Main(String[] args)"
23:27:30.199 [Information]  Process exited
23:27:30.199 [Information]  Stopping previewer process
23:27:30.199 [Error]  Connection error

which is what I was hoping to completely disable.

[SiriusED]

Was playing around the same issue yesterday...
And if you rly want to disable designer for all axaml`s. You can do it in the Options -> Avalonia XAML Editor.
But in my case it was completely broken, and instead of turning it off it just switched the views to the opposite. So the only way I found - is to override default file presenter:

• RMB on the .axaml file in the sol exp.
• Open with ...
• Select XML (Text) Editor, and set it to default.
  Now all your files will be opened as pure xml source files. Plus, in case you need the designer you always can just use Shift+F7 and it will open it in separate window (Which was my actual goal).

[Doraku]

I may be missing something but you can't disable it in the option? Unlike the xaml designer

but using the xml (text) editor is a great idea! it seems the completion is still there and no more avalonia error/logs. Thanks for the tip!

[Doraku]

after some further testing the completion is actually lost so it's not really usable (not sure why I still had the completion the first time, maybe because the avalonia editor need to be started at least once? but from a fresh visual studio it does not work)

[stevemonaco]

The project needs to be built at least once for the extension to start working (this includes code completion, too).

I don't believe there's any way to fully disable the previewer component (only hide it by default), but I hope it's an option with the upgraded Accelerate tooling.