Comments on: An Overview of XAML

By: Jeff Yamada

Jeff Yamada — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:10:21 +0000

Oops, neglected to read the comments directly above. Still, can WPF compete w/ Flex in this respect?

By: Jeff Yamada

Jeff Yamada — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:03:45 +0000

I’m curious about comparing this with Flex2/3. I’ve dabbled momentarily with Blend but haven’t had the time to really dig in. I’m curious if you have an opinion on this comparison. One thing I noticed last I was looking into WPF and Blend was the lack of cross platform support. Has this changed? Can WPF really compete without this vital feature?

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:02:10 +0000

Hüseyin: From my experience, I would suggest you only develop WPF apps for Vista-forward machines if for no other reason than they require .NET 3.0, which is around 200MB download if I recall. Performance isn't so much of an issue as the aesthetics (default button styles for example), and frameworks needed.

By: Hüseyin

Hüseyin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:38:20 +0000

You haven’t mentioned about the performance of WPF apps, what about that one? I have seen comments that WPF doesn’t work well on old machines and this can prevent it being mainstream. What are your opinions?

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:58:06 +0000

Michael: Saying that you can just "lay out your app in Visual Studio" is akin to saying that all websites could just be laid out in Dreamweaver WYSIWYG view and be done with it. Visual studio is fine for maybe a dialog box, or a form page that's ugly as sin.

But we're talking about a whole new breed of apps. Check out some of the samples from Thirteen23 to get a small taste of the flexibility WPF offers. WPF/XAML more or less opens up windows dev to designers.

Opening up a dev technology to designers is huge.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:40:09 +0000

I may be missing some critical point here, or I may just be ignorant of windows development (even though I studied it in college), but does windows dev really need to be "turned around" and is this really going to be a stepping stone for it?

Again, I may just be speaking out of ignorance here, but isn't it easy enough to start laying out your app in Visual Studio and then position things programatically for precision as needed? How is writing an xml-style file for appearance going to help much when so many programmers are proficient enough without it? I can understand the idea of abstracting the design from the logic a bit, but as you stated yourself it's more academic in windows dev than practical at this point.

I and a lot of other developers find app layout a menial task at best that can be suitably done visually. I know that this is a far cry from web dev where we do all layouts manually to get the best results, but why bother in windows dev?

Just a few thoughts... :)

By: Kyle

Kyle — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:25:22 +0000

Well, in many ways I’ve jumped over as well :) But what fills the bank account…

In any case, even for non-windows developers I really do think that XAML/WPF is very relevant. It’s my hope that Cocoa adopts a similar technology and makes interface design as accessible as windows has. If not for how bad Vista was, I really do think WPF could have turned around windows app development…. oh well.

By: Colin Devroe

Colin Devroe — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:52:45 +0000

Nice overview. Sometimes it is good to see some development notes from "the other side of the fence" that I jumped over so long ago now.

Thanks.