XAML in .NET 4 | The Continuum Show

aL_
Rx ftw

wow thats great stuff! :O the decoupling of xaml from wpf/wf is really great news Smiley the new features are really great too , the object-to-xaml story espeacially Smiley will vs provide intellisense to when editing those xaml files too? :O it would be really cool to hear about the xaml editor changes in vs as well Smiley maybe thats coming up Smiley

stevo_
Human after all

In reply to aL_

#May 21st @ 8:35 AM

Pretty much one of my hobby projects has been waiting on this.. whats the story on using the .net 4.0 beta with vs2008?

Rob Relyea

Thanks Adam for having us on Channel 9!

There are more details about XAML2009 and System.Xaml.dll on my WindowsClient.Net blog.

aL_ - VS intellisense (and Blend intellisense) don't support all the next XAML2009 features yet, but will in the future. (See XAML2009 isn't everywhere yet...). Mark Wilson-Thomas, soon to be on Channel 9, should cover some of the enhancements in VS 2010 for XAML, including intellisense for MarkupExtensions.

stevo_ - VS 2008 can't target .NET 4.0 applications, but VS 2010 can target 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 applications! Multitargeting...gotta love it!

Thanks, Rob Relyea

section31
OutOfCoffeeException

In reply to Rob Relyea

#May 21st @ 9:26 AM

Sounds great!!!
Is there any getting started to use XAML in a custom file format???

Rob Relyea

section31-
Not positive what you mean by that question...so I'll discuss custom file formats & XAML a bit. Please rephrase/expand on that question if I don't cover what you want to know.

There are many custom file formats that you could imagine that hold "XAML Data". WPF uses BAML. Baml2006Reader surfaces up objects, members & values. Used in conjunction with the XamlObjectWriter, you can read BAML and have it create object graphs.

If you wanted to invent your own file format to replace XAML's XML format, you would build a new subclass of System.Xaml.XamlReader and System.Xaml.XamlWriter.

Thanks, Rob

stevo_
Human after all

In reply to Rob Relyea

#May 21st @ 11:36 AM

Hi Rob,
I think he was asking for some getting started with System.Xaml, how would you get your custom xaml markup into object graphs etc.. I have a few questions regarding xaml but I'm not sure where to ask them.. for example - for my own xaml, could the files be .xaml extensions? how do you enable designer support then? I would guess visual studio is told to use certain designers for certain root object types?

What about case sensitivity? could I have <something /> vs <Something /> ? what about intercepting how attributes are mapped to properties, so that for example I could have an attribute that would represent an elements 'markup name', so that I could say:

[MarkupName("xaml-rocks")]
public bool XamlRocks { get; set; }

and have:

<something xaml-rocks="true" /> (ideally with intellisense)

And if this is possible, presumably via a custom reader- how do I tell the ide to use this reader to understand MY xaml?

I know theres a lot of questions there and I'm being cheeky asking but if you could point me perhaps to a 'xaml community' Tongue Out ..

Cheers in advance.

section31
OutOfCoffeeException

In reply to Rob Relyea

#May 21st @ 11:36 AM

Ok, what I have is a given object graph and I would like to use XAML to de-/serialize it. But also take advantage of validation and intellisense. Currently I use my own XML dialect and I have to implement all the parsing stuff by my self. One feature I would like to have the ability to just write changes from the object graph to they specific spot in the XML and not to generate the whole document and loose all the user formatting. I guess XAML is able to do it?

freefly

Where can I download that tool ? I would love to see the code generated from XAML and play around with it.

aL_
Rx ftw

In reply to Rob Relyea

#May 21st @ 9:26 AM

ok but i got the impression that this stuff was going to be availalble in .net 4 Smiley what parts will available and what parts wont? do you see VS support in the vs10 timeframe or a later version?