Monday mornings are for work-related reading. So I just finished reading this essay titled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? by Charles Petzold (author of several books on Windows programming). It's about human-machine relations and the state of GUI development on Windows. It's funny in the beginning but also contains a lot of insight into the history of GUI design by programmers and how it's changed over the last two decades -- very relevant in the context of what's happening today with the recent resurgence in JavaScript/DHTML and the new XML-based approaches to UI design.
As an engineer on Flex, I couldn't help drawing parallels. For example, Charles likes the new dynamic layout features in Windows Forms and Avalon, and actually prefers it as the default in his IDE. In Avalon (not in Windows Forms), it's the default. Last I checked, Canvas (i.e. absolute positioning) was the default in Flex Builder 2. What do developers prefer? What do designers prefer?
I found this comment on XAML quite interesting (emphasis is mine):
... I saw an Avalon clock application that somebody at Microsoft wrote. It actually set the time once in code and used Avalon animation entirely implemented in XAML to keep the clock going. It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML. The only thing that would have appalled me more was seeing 60 tick marks implemented 60 identical chunks of XAML.
Either XAML doesn't have a Repeater, or Charles doesn't know about it (given the author's background, I'm guessing it's the former) :)
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