What version of Blend supports WPF 4.5, Portable Class Library?

Question

I am setting up the project structure for a new greenfield application. Our initial release will only support a WPF client, but we want to eventually roll out Metro and Silverlight clients as well. I decided on the following:

Core Library - Portable class library targeting .NET for metro, .NET 4.5, SL4, Windows Phone 7.5

WPF Application - Targeting .NET 4.5

Our Model/ViewModel layer is defined in the Core Library, View defined in the WPF Application. I chose .NET 4.5 in order to support defining the viewmodel in the core library in a way that can be consumed by both WPF and Metro.

This works fine in the Visual Studio 11 Beta running on Windows 7 Pro. I have a working view that is data bound to the ViewModel defined in the Core Library. My problem is Blend. When I open the View in Blend, I get no designer. I suspect the problem here is support for WPF on .NET 4.5. I have tried Blend 4 and Blend for VS11 Beta.

Does anyone know how to get the designer working in Blend for WPF views as described above?

*Status as of 2012-05-10: No combination of VS11 and Blend appear to support WPF 4.5.

Answer 1

Since Visual Studio 2012, Update 2, the preview version of Blend (Blend + Sketchflow Preview for VS2012) has been merged with into the vanilla "Blend for Visual Studio 2012". This means that there is now a single designer application for all XAML platforms:

With Blend (for Visual Studio 2012), you can design and build:

• Windows Store apps
• Windows Phone apps
• Sketchflow prototypes
• Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications

Answer 2

edit: At this time, there's no Blend support for WPF 4.5. Here's the relevant info:

You need to install Visual Studio 11 Beta (Ultimate, Premium, or Professional -- NOT Express since it lacks the Blend pieces you want) on a Windows 8 preview build. That's just how they decided to line things up. Even once you do this, you still won't have WPF support:

Please be aware that in the Visual Studio beta, the XAML authoring support for Windows 8 is not quite at the same level of stability and completeness yet as the HTML authoring support.

Windows 8 requirement: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/devschool/archive/2012/03/01/blend-5-and-visual-studio-11-awesome.aspx

Visual Studio versions: http://blendinsider.com/technical/visual-authoring-for-the-windows-8-consumer-preview-with-blend-and-visual-studio-2012-02-29/