Jelle Druyts

I just made the most obvious observation: ASP.NET 2.0 and XAML are mother and daughter. And their hereditary determined angle-bracket beauty will only be increasing by the laws of natural selection.

Although that shouldn't come as a surprise at all since it's often been said that "XAML is to WinForms what ASP.NET was to the web". I just hadn't had the physical real-world click just until now. (Of course it's already been shown extensively that XAML isn't really tied to WinForms at all, but it's probably still the most useful scenario for it.)

So what triggered the click? I just noticed that some ASP.NET controls provide a kind of nested properties like <SomeControl Property-NestedProperty="[value]" />, e.g. <GridView HeaderStyle-Font-Bold="True" />. That's just like the nested properties syntax in XAML (only here they're using a dash in stead of a dot). I don't think the syntax here is as universally supported (I've only seen it with a number of properties, mostly to do with styles) but it's conceptually the same.

Another thing that struck me is the template mechanism; it's been there since the beginning really, but in fact it's just a way to attach template objects to controls (like grids) without using code. In other words: declarative object coupling.

So to realize their 70% code reduction claims they're providing declarative nested attributes and object coupling - exactly what XAML is so damn good at… I should've seen this long ago, I'm so slow...