Blend for Visual Studio 2012 - No design view

Question

I have a normal WPF MVVM-Light application, that I tried opening in Blend (first time I used Blend for Visual Studio 2012 on my Windows 8 machine).

However, I'm not able to open the Design View, which pretty much renders Blend useless.

One issue I read was that it happens when your application's Output Type is set to Console, which isn't the case for me. Anyone else seen this?

Answer 1

This appears to be the default Blend behavior when Blend does not support the .NET framework version that a project is configured to target. You can resolve this by opening the project in VS, opening the project properties(Alt-Enter), and changing the target framework to a supported version. For example, as of my writing this, Blend does not support .NET 4.5.2. You must convert it to 4.5.1 (c.f. http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedbackdetail/view/934732/blend-for-visual-studio-2013-does-not-render-the-design-view-with-net-framework-4-5-2)

Answer 2

Apparantly, Blend included in VS2012 only supports Windows 8 Apps.

However, there's a preview been released for Blend + Sketchflow that allows other platforms here :

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30702