Rob Relyea

xaml:Blog

Do you find intellisense for XAML useful

I've written in the past about the Avalon schema that one gets installed with VS 2005 Extensions for WinFX.

Now that VS 2005 is final, I'm excited to take advantage of some bug fixes made in the Xml Editor to make the schema more useful.

Before I bother to go do that, I had sent mail out internally asking what our plan should be for installing the schema (should the Windows SDK distribute it also?  if it did, where would it install it?  etc...).

Somebody chimed in with the opinion that we shouldn't even ship the XSD because it currently gives both false positives and false negatives.

I'd love to hear opinions from our customers:

  • if it is more trouble than help?  should we stop shipping it?
  • if we keep it alive, what we should focus on improving?
  • what are the most common false positives (things that fail to compile, but things you don't get warned for)
  • what are the most common false negatives (things that compile, but were warned for by the schema)

Thanks, Rob

Posted on Oct 31 2005, 12:56 PM by rrelyea
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Comments

  • Chris Cavanagh said:
    The intellisense is great as a cue, but obviously it'd be fantastic if it always told the truth ;o)

    What other options are there? I like being able to get all my visuals in XAML, but it still falls short of being intuitive :o( There have been a few places I 'wanted' to do something in XAML, but ended up doing it in codebehind out of frustration :o( (mostly sketchy documentation and/or my lack of understanding).

    Bottom line... If XSD/intellisense can be made 'perfect' for XAML (with no hacks) then great. If instead you plan VS.Net to have a WYSIWYG XAML designer, focus on that and make it as cool as possible. I could live without XAML intellisense if I could switch to the designer and watch what XAML it created for me...
    October 31, 2005 12:10 PM
  • DrewMarsh said:
    I totally find it useful, but know that it will just never be 100% right because of the dynamic nature of a WPF graph as well as the limitations in XML Schema that prevent certain scenarios from being described.

    IMHO, the trick is figuring out how to you explain this mismatch to developers when you know they're just going to dive into the editor and expect it to just work.

    Just my 2¢,
    Drew
    October 31, 2005 3:01 PM
  • Tor said:
    Hi Rob,

    The XAML intellisense is very valuable and it would be a great loss if it was removed. It doesn't have to be perfect. To me it is both a productivity tool and a good way of learning XAML (and the associated framework namespaces).
    October 31, 2005 10:30 PM