I was recently ranting about WPF and Silverlight. Andy expanded and clarified his thoughts on his blog, where he also mentions:

| My fear, though, is that the industry will try to make XAML yet-another utility language

That brings up a point I will be raising with some people at Microsoft. I think XAML can be made more powerful in a few key aspects. I'm not talking about making Andy's fears real. Far from it. I want XAML to take over as much of visual side of things so that developers have to do even less for the UI and concentrate on their code.

One of these is the Triggers architecture. I think it should be expanded out of the Template zone. Right now only ControlTemplates and Styles use Triggers. If you introduce higher level property and event triggers in XAML objects, a lot of visual programming is possible.

Let's take an example of a simple textbox. Our goal is to make the textbox red when a negative value is entered. You can easily inherit the textbox, add two bits of code and voila. It's done. But that's with procedural code. If you have more powerful triggers, a designer can go in, select a control and add the trigger for this like you would a IsMouseOver = True trigger. It would make things easier. A lot.

This was just a simple and stupid example. But a lot of interactivity can be added with this. And lots of functionality can be added by the designer - mostly functionality relating to the UX that he or she would have to depend upon a developer for.

.NET 4.0 will be great. I can't wait.

WPF

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