Xaml, late bound plug-ins, poor documentation and old documentation
OK well I know it has been a while since I last blogged, but hey sometimes life gets into the way (I took a great 2 week vacation to Ireland, instituted a new persistence system into the major project I run, and played with my kids in what little free time I've had).
<rant on>
OK on to the topic, I have been using Xaml since last May (mostly using MyXaml but keeping an eye on Mobiform, Xamlon and Microsoft). To give you an idea of how I am trying to use Xaml the program I wrote is trying to make a more powerful plug-in system than what Windows.Forms can do now. This application currently uses a late bound plug-in system to allow it to be extended in different ways (read new data source begets new plug-in(s) to deal with the data). Now I had a system using MyXaml which allowed me to load a Xaml + codebehind into a System.Windows.Forms.UserControl and deal with the plug-ins as separate units of work. Now I have tried to do this with the existing code bases out on the web and well I can not seem to separate the Xaml parser from the main form for the application. This is not acceptable I need a system where I can load the Xaml file + codebehind on the fly (sometimes I maybe loading the files from a Web service or even a local database (Oh my) this is an idea I am playing with for distributing plug-ins, more on this in a different post). Now for the last two weeks I have been trying out the latest versions of parsers on the web and unfortunately I need to say that MyXaml still has them beat in how to make a working GUI. Not that what they have achieved is not significant it is; but from my perspective (I need to create standard Gui's and yes they need to do things like 3D visualization and show pictures (it is a scientific application and needs to show chemical structures, topo maps, etc.) they just do not quite cut it. Yes the graphics are there now let's get the integration with a standard application done.
OK now on to documentation: this issue is with what is still out on the web most of the documentation for Xaml is from last years PDC for ch#$$ sake; most of it has no basis in reality today (I have been trying to find some info on the Mapping PI but the only person who seems to have used it is Don Box) Arrgh!!! All I want is to find out how many different attributes a map pi can have besides xmlnamespace, namespace, and assembly. But all of the documentation I find does not even state that the mapping tag even exists! Now as to poor documentation I would really love it if someone would write an article about Xaml which did not use inline code! How about a nice codebehind file, separate the controller from the view people (my model lives a long way away from either the view or the model(for those who do not know what I am talking about go read up on the MVC pattern)).
</rant off>
OK well I needed to get this off my chest (I have been very frustrated for the last 2 weeks and well now that I thought the problem was licked I found out that, no, the system was actually early bound). UGG.