How to enable Windows Forms Design View in Visual Studio 2019

Question

I'm starting with the Head First C# book and right off the bat I can't get my screen to look like how it looks in the book. It wants me to open Visual Studio, create a new Windows Forms Application and the picture they have shows Design View which has a blank form in the center and on the left, there's a Toolbox with bunch of windows form items to drag to the center, such as pointer, button, checkbox, label, listbox, etc. When I'm searching online how to get this Design View, everyone says select the form in the solution explorer and either right click and select Solution Designer or click Shift+F7. All this does is goes to the code in the center of the screen. How do I get to see the visual part of the form instead of just the code?

Answer 1

The .NET Core implementation of Windows Forms does not include a designer by default as it is still a preview feature.

The instructions to install the preview designer can be found here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-core-windows-forms-designer-preview-1/

Alternatively, and more likely what you want to do is use the full .NET Framework for your Windows Forms application.

To do this, when creating the project in Visual Studio there will be a project type called 'Windows Forms App (.NET Framework)'

Answer 2

I had a similar issue. It turns out I was opening the Folder my program was in and not the Solution file. When I opened solution, it worked as expected.

EDIT: This is from right-clicking the .cs file in Solution Explorer. The Shift + F7 also doesn't work if you opened it as a folder rather than a solution.