Chapter 2. XAML and the property system

 

This chapter covers

  • The basics of XAML
  • The structures Silverlight uses when working with XAML
  • The property system
  • Introduction to commands
  • Creating XAML at runtime

Before the sibling inventions of WPF and Silverlight, individual programming languages and platforms had a variety of ways of specifying the UI. Most touted the concept of separating the UI from the implementation code. In some cases, such as on the web with HTML and CSS, the representation of the UI was theoretically separated from its underlying implementation but not truly so until tried-and-true patterns, such as Model-View-Controller (MVC), were applied. In others, such as Windows Forms, the separation was due only to hidden autogenerated, uneditable files that contained the language-specific code necessary to create the UI.

With WPF, Microsoft introduced XAML (pronounced “Zammel”) to provide a cleaner separation of concerns between the definition of the UI and the code that makes it work. This not only allows for some sleek design patterns such as the MVVM pattern (discussed in chapter 33) but also makes it easier to create tooling.

2.1. XAML basics

2.2. Object trees and namescope

2.3. XAML type converters

2.4. Loading XAML at runtime

2.5. Summary