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Here's Your Chance To Help Shape XAML's Future

Don't like the way XAML works today? Have some ideas that you think will make it easier to work with or more robust? Well here's your chance to make yourself heard.

Personally, I think XAML has everyone confused as hell right now. Microsoft currently has it packaged as if it belongs solely to Avalon. This makes sense since this is the team within Microsoft who actually had a concrete use for it at first. However, as Don has demonstrated, it can also be used to write code that has no relation to Avalon technologies what-so-ever. The core, abstract concepts of XAML are really easy to understand if you take away the more concrete, complex, Avalon specific samples.

Personally, I think that XAML needs to be taken out from under the Avalon umbrella and packaged as a generic engine. Then the Avalon side of the story simply becomes one of re-use and specialization of that engine.

Posted: Dec 08 2003, 05:06 PM by drub0y | with 8 comment(s)
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Comments

Douglas Husemann said:

Drew,

I was kinda thinking the same thing. and Looking at Xaml, it appears it isn't explicitly applied to Avalon at all but is tied to it in that is where it started.

From looking at the samples. I can make a console app a winforms ap or an avalon ap.by just assigning namespace.

Looking further is should be difficult for other areas to use it. using the name space for system.speech for example you could have a xaml layout and an create a simple text to speech platform all from angle bracket code) I haven't tried it yet to see if you can go outside of the platform,

I ponder if XAML is the so called X# language that was going around.

# December 8, 2003 11:28 PM

Drew Marsh said:

Douglas,

Exactly. As far as XAML == X#, I think you're right. I can't imagine there's another hidden XML language within the walls of MS at this point. Well... maybe in MSR. ;)
# December 8, 2003 11:38 PM

Don Box said:

Drew,

See my latest blog entry. I look forward to hearing what you have in mind (I'm supportive and sympathetic btw).

DB
# December 9, 2003 4:55 AM

RichB said:

I agree. My application builds up a complex object graph at runtime and then iterates over the graph performing calculations on it. At the moment my Unit Testing process uses a lot of code to build up the object graph. I would much prefer a simple object construction and wiring language to simplify this step.

I have also wondered about XAML==X# :-)
# December 9, 2003 7:28 AM

Sam Gentile said:

I also agree but need to think a bit further on an example.
# December 9, 2003 8:09 AM

Sam Gentile said:

Don, Drew, sorry for placing this here but I have two topic on SOA that I am confused on and I could use your help and clarifications on Don if you get a chance.
http://samgentile.com/blog/posts/10813.aspx
http://samgentile.com/blog/posts/10831.aspx

Thanks in advance.
# December 9, 2003 8:11 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

Looking at the samples, and reading the PDC Special Issue of MSDN Mag which contains an introduction to XAML and Avalon, separation between UI and code was very clear. And separation between UI and plain old Win32 was even more clear.

I wonder if XAML wouldn't be a nice way to write cross-plstform rich client applications in .NET, provided that Mono of some other vendor (Xamlon?) supports this scenario.
# December 9, 2003 9:35 AM

Kevin Moore said:

If you're curious about Microsoft's work in XML languages, you might want to look at this paper from Microsoft Research.

http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/Papers/oopsla.pdf

Amazingly cool stuff.
# December 12, 2003 12:32 AM
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