Uno Platform
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Announcing Hot Design Public Beta -
A Visual Designer for Cross-Platform Desktop, Mobile and Web Apps
At .NET Conf 2024, we unveiled Hot Design, a Visual Designer that transforms how developers design, build, and iterate on their applications. Today, we’re excited to finally share it with the broader .NET developer community by launching Hot Design Public Beta.
Hot Design is an industry-first Visual Designer for cross-platform .NET applications that seamlessly transforms your live app into a fully interactive design environment, accessible from any IDE on any OS.
After the Hot Design announcement, we started rolling it out to our contributor community to get early feedback. We also opened a waitlist, which attracted thousands of developers eager to experience the highly sought-after visual design capabilities.
Since the announcement, we’ve been working to stabilize Hot Design, as well as adding new features—the mobile, web and desktop support we’re announcing today!
Today, the wait is over—you can try Hot Design right now – no waitlist!
Counter App with Hot Design
Get started with the Hot Design Public Beta by building a simple Counter App using our tutorial.
Refresher on Hot Design and Uno Platform Studio
As announced in November 2024, Hot Design is part of our developer productivity tooling suite Uno Platform Studio.
To make every developer as productive as possible, Uno Platform Studio aids developers through the various parts of the development lifecycle, from design handoff to continuously designing and building the app:
- Hot Design™ – The Industry-first Visual Designer for cross-platform .NET Applications. Transform your running app into a Designer from any IDE on any OS.
- Hot Reload – Reliably update any code in your app and get instant confirmation your changes were applied with its new App Indicator
- Design-to-Code – Completely eliminate the manual design handoff process by generating ready-to-use well-structured/clean XAML or C# Markup code from a single click.
Hot Design is a new take on Visual Designers. We believe past attempts for WYSWYG designers were good for decades past, but not for today, where modern Visual Designers and AI-assisted development will be essential parts of development workflow.
Looking at the quadrants above, you can see that the Hot Design brings benefits that cannot be met with traditional designers.
- Seamless Experience – Hot Design bridges the gap between design-time and runtime, providing a unified, real-time editing environment that eliminates inefficiencies.
- True-to-Life UI – Unlike traditional design-time tools, Hot Design reflects the final UI accurately, to the pixel, including real data and interactions, so what you see is really what you get.
- Deep Integration – Hot Design fits seamlessly into development workflows, working with your existing tools to streamline the entire process. Developers don’t need *any* additional tools to create UIs quickly.
- Cross-Platform Flexibility – Hot Design works across all operating systems and with it you can create apps for desktop, mobile, web and embedded devices, making it the ideal tool for cross-platform development.
- Faster, Smoother Workflow – Hot Design keeps everything in one place, reducing context switching and speeding up iteration, allowing you to stay in the flow.
In summary, Hot Design allows you to stay in flow and use your live running application as a design surface.
Make edits directly in the Emulator
Now in public beta: Mobile support like you’ve never seen before! With Hot Design, your mobile emulators or physical device become a live design surface, allowing you to fine-tune UI elements in real-time – right there in the emulator or on a device. With this approach, you ensure you are testing for mobile-specific constraints like safe areas, navigation bars, status bars, and gestures. This dynamic approach not only accelerates iteration cycles but also ensures that apps look and behave correctly across different devices and different form factors.
The Hot Design panes, Toolbox, Elements and Properties, are displayed in a separate window, allowing you to create, select and modify elements in the running application. If you’re running in the emulator, you can also use handy emulator toolbar features, such as device rotation, to fine tune your application.
Web Support – it’s like Chrome DevTools on Steroids!
Time for the browser to shine! With Hot Design, your web app becomes a live design surface, letting you tweak UI elements directly in the browser—no need to rebuild or refresh.
It’s like Chrome DevTools on steroids but built for developers who want instant feedback without digging through the DOM or tweaking CSS manually.
You can fine-tune layouts, styles, and responsive behaviors in real time, ensuring pixel-perfect results across screen sizes.
Hot Design on Desktop - Mac and Linux
Uno Platform apps run natively on Mac and Linux, so naturally Hot Design is enabled on these targets.
This includes Raspberry Pie scenarios too! So, imagine visually designing a remote Raspberry Pi running Linux, right from VS Code. Mind-blowing!
Get Started with Hot Design
Uno Platform Studio Hot Design simplifies UI development by eliminating restarts, rebuilds and context switching, for the most productive .net dev loop.
Here are some resources to get you started:
Uno Platform Studio Pricing
The Uno Platform Studio Community version is free, and it gives access to the most complete Hot Reload in the .NET ecosystem, including live visual indicators. This new visual indicator provides real-time feedback on changes applied during Hot Reload, helping you to debug and to refine your apps efficiently. You can get the community version by simply creating an account on Uno Platform website.
The Uno Platform Studio Pro version will be paid, and it is going to offer a combination of Hot Design, Design-to-Code and other productivity boosters which supplement the core benefits provided by the core Uno Platform Open-Source project. While we haven’t decided on the price or SKU structure yet, our plan is to offer developer-friendly pricing like typical offerings in .NET space, be it 3rd party UI component providers or IDE plugins.
Both community and pro SKUs are going to grow in terms of items / benefits offered, which we are going to announce at a later date. If you have ideas or would like to volunteer your time to help us decide on pricing, please contact info@platform.uno
Lastly, Uno Platform remains an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license. The tooling in Uno Platform Studio is powerful but optional for developing cross-platform .NET applications with Uno Platform.
Summary
Our public beta is all about gathering feedback to refine existing features and shape what comes next. Help us improve cross-platform .NET development—try out Hot Design and let us know what you think! Share your ideas and report any issues.
Tags: XAML, WPF, Xamarin, UWP, Silverlight, .NET, Windows, C#, XAML