EDIT: Houra, “Absolutely free for everyone!“. A very good new! And now with support of Xamarin, WPF and UWP.
In a first approach, Ammy could be just a better json based syntax for xaml. And there is more:
- global and local variables
$fontColor = "#363636"
can be reused:
TextBlock {
Foreground: $fontColor
}
- Aliases can be seen as a function returning a node:
alias Header(text) {
TextBlock {
FontSize: 18
Text: $text
}
}
can be easily used :
StackPanel {
@Header("First chapter") {
}
}
- and mixins can be seen as function providing a set of properties:
mixin SeeThrough(opacity=0.5) for UIElement {
Opacity: $opacity
}
Button {
#SeeThrough()
}
or sub node(s):
mixin DefaultItem() for ComboBox {
ComboBoxItem {
"Select quantity"
}
}
ComboBox {
#DefaultItem()
}
or
mixin TwoRows(height1, height2) for Grid {
RowDefinitions: [
RowDefinition { Height: $height1 }
RowDefinition { Height: $height2 }
]
}
Grid {
#TwoRows(25, "*")
}
and are composable.
UWP is said to be coming soon but what about Xamarin forms?
This is all well and good except a big drawback: it’s not free, should be paid monthly and is extremely expensive ($299 per month for commercial project made by more than a single developer). So it’s unusable. I’m not going to invest my time to learn a new graphical language if I’m sure to be able to use it anywhere! What a pity!
Even without a VS designer, such a refresh could be extremely useful but this should be a community effort and not a commercial one to be successful.