Xamlon Review & Overview
I set up a virtual machine and installed the trial version of Xamlon. Basically it’s a product that was developed by a company that decied to make Microsoft’s Xaml specification available in a product today. Microsoft plans to support Xaml in the next version of Windows (Longhorn).
It took me a little while to figure out how it worked and how it fit in to Microsoft’s technology path and vision. It appears that it is a system for replacing graphical design in your code, with XML, called XAML. It’s kind of like how web applications use HTML or XHTML to define the graphical presentation layer. Beyond that, there is support for cool things like vector based graphics. Their sample applications are fairly impressive at showing off the graphics capabilities. They have some demo’s that have a pure .NET dll for the control, and an XML file that creates the graphics. The forms can be resized to any size, and still look excellent.
So how does it work? From what I can tell, if you want to embed Xaml into a form, you can use the control that they developed as a container. Their control processes the XML and handles the graphics. If you want it to work in your browser, it works nearly the same. There is a .NET control that hosts the XAML application. Xamlon applications can also have embedded .NET controls.
So is it worth using? Maybe. I’m not sure it adds a lot of value to every application, but there are probably some specific applications that could benefit. This puts them in a position to give Flash some competition. When Longhorn gets released, you’ll be able to compile your XAML applications with the supplied compiler, and run their natively without Xamlon. That makes it pretty compelling to purchse a license to Xamlon to be ready for the future.