What makes visual studio's designer kick in for design time support

Question

I have a c# control library which contains my models, viewmodels and views. I hook everything up as I usually do but I do not get any design time feedback from visual studio's designer (blendability).

When I load my assambly in a WPF project and include the view as custom user control I'll get my design time feedback. Unfortunately this WPF Project is only a test shell because the view will live in another app.

It would be more efficient for my dev pipeline if I could have blendability (design time) support in my class library? What makes visual studio kick in to show my design time datacontext?

I even use d:DataContext="{d:DesignInstance dd:DesignViewModel}" in my class library. No design time data in class library.

Answer 1

Try

d:DataContext="{d:DesignInstance dd:DesignViewModel, IsDesignTimeCreatable=True}

There is a blog here that may help you too.