// the find
ForNeVeR/AvaloniaRider
JetBrains Rider plugin for Avalonia development
A JetBrains Rider plugin that adds live XAML preview, file templates, and live code snippets for Avalonia UI development. It's the official tooling bridge between Rider and Avalonia's designer previewer protocol — if you're building cross-platform desktop apps with Avalonia and using Rider, this is non-optional. Actively maintained with a push yesterday.
The BSON-based custom transport layer for the previewer protocol (BsonStreamReader/Writer + AvaloniaPreviewerSession) is a proper implementation, not a hack — it speaks the same binary protocol Avalonia's design-time host expects. Two previewer backends (bitmap AvaloniaRemote and browser-based HTML) give you options when one misbehaves. The shadow-copy option for output assemblies is a practical detail that prevents file-locking issues during build cycles. CI publishes dev-channel builds automatically on every branch push, so you can test against bleeding-edge Avalonia without waiting for a stable release.
577 stars for something that is effectively required infrastructure for Rider + Avalonia is low — it signals the Avalonia ecosystem is still small, and this plugin will live or die with that ecosystem. The mixed-language build (Kotlin plugin + C# ReSharper host + Gradle + .NET in the same repo) means the contributor bar is high: you need to understand the RD protocol, Gradle's IntelliJ plugin framework, and MSBuild all at once to fix anything non-trivial. There's no hot-reload support (edits don't update the preview without a rebuild), which is a noticeable gap versus the WPF designer experience. Test coverage is thin — a handful of unit tests for MSBuild parameter collection and BSON headers, but nothing that exercises the previewer session lifecycle or the theme injection end-to-end.