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by Frank Hileman.
Original Post: Does Microsoft want developer criticism of Avalon?
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Feed Description: Vector Graphics with VG.net, MyXaml, and Visual Studio Integration
When Microsoft employees began posting and responding to blogs about Avalon, I was pleasantly suprised. But I have noticed something not so pleasant, as well.
Every time someone criticizes XAML or the Avalon API, the response from MS is either “defend“ or “overwhelming detail“. A refreshing response would be, “yes, we know this is a problem, and we are fixing it”.
The defenses are very interesting, and sometimes convincing. But why ask for feedback, if Avalon is frozen? Why not fix the problems? Is Avalon frozen?
I can understand why blog commenters might not always be taken seriously. Sometimes, the noisiest posters, are also the least qualified to give an opinion. But this is not always the case. Many respondants are qualified -- this is why they are drawn to the blogs in the first place, by mutual interest. One of the first commenters on my blog was “DonXML“ -- a serious vector graphics developer.
The Avalon API is not friendly. My posts about Changeable (unneccessary complexity) and Length (needs an implicit converter from double) resulted in complex explanations, nothing more. My complaints about weak typing in the Avalon API, and the clumsiness of the Decorator pattern, were ignored.
When Marc Clifton criticized the illogical MS-XAML syntax, he was not the only person complaining. Everyone hates the compound property syntax. Instead of making changes, I see MS posts critical of Marc (one calling Marc a “Prolific SOB“), and MyXaml, the open-source XAML for Windows Forms developers.
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