For Visual Studio 2010, this answer does the job. For Visual Studio 2012 or above, what you need to do is actually debug the Visual Studio Designer process. The process you want to debug is called XDesProc.exe . I do the following: Open two instances of Visual Studio both pointing to the same solution Close … Read more
Using VS2010 you can use Design-Time attributes (works for both SL and WPF). I usually have a mock data-source anyway so it’s just a matter of: Adding the namespace declaration xmlns:d=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008″ Adding the mock data context to window/control resources <UserControl.Resources> <ViewModels:MockXViewModel x:Key=”DesignViewModel”/> </UserControl.Resources> Setting design-time data context <Grid d:DataContext=”{Binding Source={StaticResource DesignViewModel}}” … Works well enough.