Radzen for Blazor - VS as the code tool, round tripping & design surface

I'm keen to get started with Blazor (for server and desktop) & Radzen. I can't seem to find the answer as to whether or not I can load VS Community edition, start a Blazor app and drag and drop whichever Radzen controls I want to use in my app or whether I have to use the Radzen IDE. Can anyone help?

Equally in a perfect world could I 'embed' Radzen as my UI design tool within VS or round trip into VS if this were not possible - this to write the code? Basically I'd like VS to be the sole access point but I'm getting the impression (rightly or wrongly) the UI has to be done in the Radzen IDE and it's also going to generate a lot of code for me which right now isn't going to be so helpful i.e. as I'm learning would prefer to use VS intellisense.

Hi @Rod_Macdonald,

The Radzen IDE is needed for the visual UI design. You cannot embed it in Visual Studio. You can however run and debug the Blazor application produced by Radzen in Visual Studio. Just be aware that the current version of Radzen will generate the .razor file after every change you make and you may lose any custom modifications unless you follow these rules. We plan to address that with the next major release Radzen 3.0.

You can also use the Radzen Blazor components with VS only and rely on autocomplete/intellisense.

Thank you for getting back to me. If the Radzen IDE can't be embedded in Visual Studio, is there a way to round trip from Radzen to VS and back again? In other words, design in Radzen and code in VS at the click of a button?

On a separate note, will Radzen 3 allow me to create Blazor desktop apps and when might it be released? Thank you.

No, there is no such button.

Radzen 3.0 will not have desktop apps support initially. We are still working on it and don't have a release date set. You can check this thread which we use to report our progress: Radzen 3.0 (vNext) Progress