Inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2

It is hard to understand the level of animosity that some Microsoft developers seem to have towads XAML.  At least in WPF, if you want to, you can write out all the object initialization in source code.  But, it is hard to imagine why anyone would think that approach is better than specifying the UI object tree in XAML.  If people have trouble with the XAML, it is probably because they insist on sticking with yesterday's tools.  Conceptually the XAML is fairly trivial.  It is just a compact syntax for specifiying a tree of objects and values for properties and event handlers.  The excellent intellisense support for XAML in Visual Studio makes handling most of the syntax easy to deal with.  Of course there are some issues in understanding binding extentions and how resource references work.  But those issues really have more to do with a funtional understanding the structure of the UI tree than they do with any particular method of specifying it.  I don't doubt that high quality UI design tools are a better user interface than raw XAML.  But functional UI's built around a tree of objects, master detail, or a data grid can easily be designed directly in XAML.

Of course, many developers have difficulty accepting the increasing emphasis on XML as a replacement for binary formats.  Those deveopers have not caught up with the implications of the success of the internet and the stream of technology that has come from the IETF, the W3C, and companies like Microsoft and IBM.