Hi Noesis team,

Our team has been very impressed with the new “Component” designer feature in Noesis Studio Tool. It represents a significant modernization of our UX design workflow, allowing designers to create and configure reusable UI modules directly within the design environment. This strongly supports the UX-driven development model we aim for.

We are currently exploring how to best leverage the existing features to optimize a specific workflow: ‌Our goal is to enable UX designers to independently create prefabs (Components) within the designer and, by filling in parameters, directly instantiate concrete instances (Component Instances) for use in the project, thereby minimizing reliance on programming code.‌

Based on this goal, we have two questions:

‌1.Regarding Runtime Support:‌ We’ve noted that the current runtime does not yet fully support this new Component XAML. Could you share any rough development timeline or plans in this area? We are eager to fully implement this workflow in our projects.

‌2.Regarding Current Best Practices:‌ While awaiting full runtime support, ‌using the existing Noesis features, is there a recommended method or pattern that would allow us to approximate the above “designer-led prefab creation and parameterized instantiation” workflow as closely as possible?‌ We hope to keep the core work within the designer, empowering designers to drive UI asset creation more autonomously.

Thank you for building such a powerful toolset. We look forward to your insights.

Hi SaeruHikari, Dorian here!

Thank you for this message, and we're absolutely thrilled that the concept behind Components has resonated with you and your team!

These are something we developed as an experimental feature within Studio as a bit of a 'proof-of-concept' to demonstrate a workflow where Designers could essentially create custom UserControls without requiring any code.

Where we're at now, is that we're currently looking into taking the lessons from these Components, and applying the same mechanics within Templates to create something even more powerful, where we're aiming to combine all of the advantages of Components (Custom Properties, Content Encapsulation, 'Dragability'), with the enormous suite of functionality offered by all of our Controls in both Studio and the Runtime.

We're still in the exploratory phase of what this looks like, with timelines still to-be-determined, but you can follow our progress through this ticket: #4708.

In terms of your second question; generally speaking, our recommendation would be to become familiar with Noesis Studio's Design-Time Data techniques.
We've created some Documentation, made for Designers, introducing all of this, and teaching a lot of the fundamentals: 📘Working With Data

This will then allow the creation of Data-Driven UI Elements, in which many of the same presentation outcomes can be achieved; but with an added advantage that any work put into the Bindings here, will also be able to seamlessly be leveraged in-Engine by Programmers.

Let us know if you have any other questions, or if there are any other subjects you'd like to touch on, and until we speak again, have a wonderful weekend!

- Dorian

Thank you for your answering, Dorian!

We have already learned much about the Data Context workflow in Noesis Studio, it's already much easier to use than Microsoft Blend's workflow. It's just slightly more complicated than the component workflow, for Designers. So we found the 'Component' experimental feature and found it suit UX-driven workflow perfectly, UX Designers just do what they do as in figma.

We learned mush about the ticket and knows your next plan! It's perfect, much more unified and powerful compared to components, perfectly matches WPF's design. It will be friendly to both programmers and UX designers. So the next step is that we will first teach our Designers how to use a data-driven approach and mock data for development, and patiently wait for the arrival of custom attributes.

Thank you again for your clear sharing and guidance! It has been very helpful to us. Wishing you a wonderful weekend too!

P.S. Using such a clear and well-structured technical solution and design tool brings us great joy and pleasure. Thank you for releasing such an excellent product.