Forums | NoesisGUI

Hi all,

I tried Noesis GUI for the first time yesterday. I have a long experience making WPF applications using XAML and MVVM patterns. Therefore I could not believe my eyes when I saw this framework.

I absolutely love the framework and the whole though of it, but after playing around for half a day I have some concerns. I'd love to hear how you all solve these problems and how your workflow is.

1. Sample data in design time: Have anyone got this to work with dynamic images, or even at all? I was hoping to make a static ViewModelBuilder and set d:DesignInstance to a hard coded instance of the viewmodel. I could not get this to work with images. Are there any neat tricks? Or do you just hit run in the editor instead?
2. Live updates: In the framework I'm currently using I can make changes to the UI (also a declarative framework) and see them happen live (both when playing and when not playing). Is there anything similar in Noesis or do you really have to run every time? Also some times it seemed like it didn't pick up the changes I made which made this process even worse.

I was hoping to do most of the work in Blend (or any other XAML editor) and work with sample data to do most of the rough work. Then when I feel confident I could try it in Unity and expect to see something similar but probably make a few tweeks.

How is your workflow?

Thanks for posting Tiddan and welcome to our forums!

1. Sample data in design time: Have anyone got this to work with dynamic images, or even at all? I was hoping to make a static ViewModelBuilder and set d:DesignInstance to a hard coded instance of the viewmodel. I could not get this to work with images. Are there any neat tricks? Or do you just hit run in the editor instead?

This is a known issue. For images to work in Blend at design time they need to use the syntax "pack://application,,,,/...", but that syntax is not compatible at runtime because in Noesis there is no application, so the URI construction fails. For now, the only solution, far from ideal, is having two different DataContexts, one for design time and one for runtime. We need to find a better solution. I wonder if you could experiment with it and tell us. We should probably open a ticket.

2. Live updates: In the framework I'm currently using I can make changes to the UI (also a declarative framework) and see them happen live (both when playing and when not playing). Is there anything similar in Noesis or do you really have to run every time? Also some times it seemed like it didn't pick up the changes I made which made this process even worse.

Hot data reloading is not implemented yet in Noesis. That's something we had planned for 2.2, but needed to leave out. For now the workaround is having more than one panel and switch between them at runtime, each time you switch they are loaded again and the Unity imported is fully functional at runtime.

By the way, we improved a lot the asset importer in 2.2, beta is already out. I wonder if you could try it out.

By the way, we improved a lot the asset importer in 2.2, beta is already out. I wonder if you could try it out.

Thanks for the great reply. I will give the new update a go along with a new attempt to try to find a good workflow.

Tiddan -- if it helps to know about how I'm using Noesis ... I am converting over a UWP project with 70+ screens and user controls so that my game is 100% contained in Unity. This has the added benefit of allowing it to work on other platforms other than PC/XBOX (i.e. iOS/PS4)

I am frequently amazed at how much Noesis supports, and is close-enough to being identical to UWP for my purposes. The changes that I am making are boilerplate alterations in code behind files to accommodate how Noesis handles eventing.

I am frequently amazed at how much Noesis supports, and is close-enough to being identical to UWP for my purposes.

Yeah I think I've been a bit unlucky with the choice of components. I first tried ListView's and they've been problematic - but most of the other stuff I've tried seems to work just fine.

I first tried ListView's and they've been problematic

What kind of problems? If you found any bug, could you please report it in our bugtracker?

Thanks for your collaboration.