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Comment by FrankenPC | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what? I thought XAML was dead. I have quite a bit of investment into Silverlight and did some WPF desktop apps years ago. I thought all that was a total waste of my time. It's not dead? This is...cautiously good news. I love XAML frankly. The data binding system with seamless C# code behind is glorious to work with.

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WPF, Silverlight, WinRT are all built on top of XAML.

There are just a few differences in the APIs, but that is about it.

Somehow, Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to pass the message that all those names are mainly the flavour of the month from the marketing department for the XAML stack.

So you can easily just change a build flag without touching any XAML or creating a new project and everything just works?

I was quite explicit

There are just a few differences in the APIs, but that is about it.

Meaning that of course some changes are required.

It is like when one changes SQL queries among RDBMS servers, of course some things change, but one doesn't have to throw out all the SQL knowledge out the window just because of that.

XAML was the main way to do the UI for Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps. Now admittedly nobody actually made any apps for those two platforms, but MS never stopped pushing XAML, it was just Silverlight and WPF they killed off (or ignored in the case of WPF).

In all fairness, they didn't kill off Silverlight. Apple did. Their refusal to allow alternative managed code browser plugins killed both Silverlight and Adobe plugins. And in retrospect it's probably a good thing. The security holes were extensive. I wonder why MS didn't try to build a .NET/Silverlight framework in asm.js? Just not worth the effort I imagine.

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