R – How to manage huge and barely maintainable XAML files

expression-blendsilverlightwpfxaml

I'm having real difficulties with XAML files in Silverlight since they get very big very fast when using Blend. It just becomes a wall of text after only a handful of controls are added and animated.

I'm hoping a better vesion of Blend will come out soon, so that our designers will never even have to see XAML. For now, though, that is not a solution – XAML still needs to be managed manually and it is a depressing task.

Has anyone found a solution to this? How do you keep your XAML files in order? How do you understand them when they get big?

Edit: I am especially interested in Silverlight solutions, since the most obvious WPF solution – splitting things up into resource dictionaries – is not supported in Silverlight.

Best Answer

I have been using Silverlight 2 since January when it was in private release, and we ran into this problem, all our XAML was in one big file. What we did as best practices was to break up the user interface into separate user controls based on visual categorization (header, footer, navigation controls etc..) Originally we tried to use nested canvases (grids had not been added to the framework yet) and this turned into a maintenance nightmare later.

In Blend you can actually select a Canvas/grid etc... from the Objects and Timeline window, right click on it, and you are given the option "Make Control.." This made for speedy re factoring and modularizing our main XAML file. We then used Events to allow the user controls to communicate between each other.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Related Solutions

Wpf – How to speed up WPF programs

How do you speed up WPF?

Often after using one of the following profiling tools it is obvious what is causing my bottlenecks.
- If memory is the issue then I virtualize my data.
- If render time is the issue then I virtualize the controls or simplify control templates where possible.
- If processing time is the issue I try to improve my algorithm or move that work to a background thread and show a throbber in my ui while the work is going.
How do you profile bottlenecks?
How do you deal with the slowness?

Profiling and counseling.

C# – WPF Resource Management

To answer my own question:

I had to implement two MarkupExtensions: One that creates an ImageSource and one that creates an ImageBrush. Those classes created the objects using relative URLs (relative to the local cache in %appdata%).

Then I was able to use:

<Grid Background="{local:LocalImageBrush Filename=some/relative/filename.png}" />

The code for the markup extension is:

class LocalImageBrush : MarkupExtension
{
  public string Filename { get; set; }

  public override object ProvideValue(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
  {
    var result = new Uri("file:///" + ProfileDirectory.LocalDataPath + "/" + Filename);
    return new ImageBrush(new BitmapImage(result));
  }
}

This also works in the Visual Studio IDE.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Wpf – How to speed up WPF programs

C# – WPF Resource Management

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