They just used it a lot and there were lots of sessions about it. It was casually mentioned in a couple of sessions that the Windows 10 shell is written in XAML. Plus it's the default choice for the built-in apps for Windows 10 and for the vast majority of third-party apps in the Windows Store. XAML is the default choice for the built-in apps for Windows 10 and for the vast majority of third-party apps in the Windows Store. With those two conferences, Microsoft put to rest the idea that XAML has no long-term viability. Instead, XAML was quietly promoted to be the UI stack of choice for leveraging the most innovative parts of the Windows 10 world. This was quite a reversal in Microsoft's attitude from late 2010 to 2014. During those days, I was sagely assured by various people within Microsoft that XAML was on the way out. HTML was The One True Way - the only viable technology for user interfaces. I was told that “virtually all business software UIs will be done in HTML5/JS in eighteen months” (that's a direct quote from a Microsoft Product Manager in 2012). Open systems and all that, and you just can't resist it, so give in. Let the pod settle in on your brain and turn you into one of us. I doubted all of that because I knew that XAML was a powerful and innovative technology. I found it hard to believe that Microsoft would simply throw it away. XAML's decline was caused much more by political infighting inside Microsoft than by any technological considerations. So I felt vindicated by Microsoft's re-emphasis on XAML as a key technology. I just don't think it's a magic bullet or universal answer. Most systems that we build have a Web-facing portion built in HTML/JS, along with a desktop or mobile interface in native technologies. We understand what HTML/JS can do, and if all or part of an application must have broad reach, that's the platform of choice.īut we also know the power of XAML, and have built many modern apps leveraging that power. For most of those applications, it would have been too costly, or even impossible in some cases, to give them the sophisticated interactions and visualizations we needed using HTML5/JS. How About WPF?Īlthough XAML on the UWP is getting most of the love right now, out in the real world, most companies still have some users on Windows 7. Microsoft recognized this, and rebuilt the WPF team. XAML in WPF is getting some new features, and is a quite viable choice if you have no idea when your users might all be on Windows 10. In essence, if you want to do new native development that runs on Windows 7, WPF is the last man standing. Windows Forms has been quiescent for over ten years. Silverlight was mortally wounded during Microsoft's political infighting and is rapidly fading away. WPF applications also run on the Windows 10 desktop, of course. So you have a pretty good medium-term shelf-life for new WPF applications. Plus, although learning any flavor of XAML is a steep climb, once you learn WPF, switching to UWP XAML for Windows 10 won't be hard. The underlying concepts in XAML, such as layout, data binding, and templating, work the same on all XAML platforms.
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