Avalon: From All Code to No Code And In Between

Today, Joe Marini, a Microsoft PM on a project that dare not speak it’s name, posts a blog reader built entirely in XAML, i.e. no .NET code.

Last week, Chris Anderson, an Architect on the Avalon team, showed us that Avalon requires no XAML at all if you don’t want to use it.

However, closer to the truth are Don and ChrisAn, Longhorn architects, on using a mixture of XAML for declarative UI tasks and code for handling events.

My own preferred model is to do just as much as I can in XAML, because I find declarative style coding more flexible, but to put into code what makes sense, e.g. most event handling. My line in the sand is this: if I would have to embed code in the XAML, I go to real code, otherwise, I use XAML.