Windows Developer Power Tools

3.3 Writing XAML in XamlPad

Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation is an exciting development environment. It provides designers with a wealth of graphical toys to create complex user interfaces and offers 3D controls, vector-based graphics to smooth scaling issues, and drastically increased performance because it makes the most of the development system’s specialized graphics processors.

The eXtensible Application Markup Language, an XML-based markup language in which many element tags correspond directly to .NET classes, ties all this together. XAML lets the definition and behavior of a user interface’s components be modeled in a text file and carried between the different tools used to create that user interface. A graphics designer lays out the visual aspects of a user interface in one tool, saves that work in a XAML file, and passes it on to another worker, who might use the Expression Interactive Designer to set up behavioral aspects of that same interface. That consolidated work finally gets handed off to a software developer, who wires up the application logic behind the work of the other two.

While all of this makes for a great user experience, programming a user interface in pure XAML and visualizing what it will look like takes some getting used to. Because .NET 3.0 is so new, there are only a few books on the subject in the pipeline, and detailed magazine and blog articles are scarce. Furthermore, the APIs and XAML syntax are still in flux, which means developers ...