Working with External Designers

Elements does not reinvent the wheel for UI design, but instead embraces each platform's native UI toolsets and with that, each platform's native way to write and design UIs.

  • For Cocoa, these are XIB and Storyboard files that can be edited in Xcode.

  • For Android, these are XML Layout Files that can be edited either as plain text XML, or using visual designers in Android Studio.

  • For Windows, both XAML (WPF) and WinForms based UI files can be edited in Visual Studio, simply by opening the same project in that IDE.

Fire and Water (and Elements in Visual Studio) integrate directly with Xcode and Android Studio to make it easy, convenient and most of all seamless to work with UI files in the platform's native designers alongside your Elements projects inside Fire.

Since Elements projects are compatible between Fire and Visual Studio, you can simply open your WPF and WinForms projects .elements project in Visual Studio, where Elements integrates directly with the .NET designers. Fire and Water also provide a great editor experience when editing XAML files, including Code Completion.

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