Rob Relyea - XAMLified

Josh Twist has an interesting post arguing that XAML writability is very important, and that many people want to edit XAML directly.

While we have focused on ease of human authoring of XAML as a goal, it has always been balanced with other goals, like toolability. Some quotes:

• “Describe Hierarchy of Objects in a Human Readable/Writable Way” - Our 7 Goals for XAML
• “XAML Describes Data in a Concise, but Human and Machine Comprehensible Way” – 8 benefits of XAML for UI and Beyond

His two examples of things that could improve WPF hand authoring of XAML:

• RowDefinitionCollection, ColumnDefinitionCollection could both have a type converter associated with them to support a syntax like that.
• Transform used to have a type converter to make ScaleTransform, RotateTransform easier that we removed late in 3.0…yes, a markup extension could also be used.

Yes, we have a bit of a love/hate relationship with minilanguages. We need to reevaluate the pros/cons of minilanguages (as Mike Hillberg was just mentioning the other day) with the XAML team, the WPF/Silverlight team, and XAML based tools teams.

In these cases, there are things that type authors can do (add a type converter), things that developers can do (build a type converter), and future things we could do in the XAML language.

I’m interested to see your opinions on the issues that Josh brings up in his post.