Tuesday, May 20, 2008

My level in XAML :)

Several hours ago The Moth (seems to be Daniel in real life) have posted an article on the levels of XAML understanding.

The proposed leveling is as following:
Level 100 – truly understand all of the above.
Level 200 – confidently read XAML (e.g. as spat out by VS2008 or Blend).
Level 300 – be able to type XAML yourself with an aim to create a structure of a bland GUI (setting basic properties and hooking events etc).
Level 400 – create styles, templates, animations and set gradient colours by hand.

I think, that everyone, who created at least one custom control for WPF (well, I mean something that could be sold), have already achieved the XAML competency level 400 :) At least most of my coworkers did and so did I. I even think that there should be one more level - 500, like God-Like...I do not think that I have achieved such level but it seems that I am somewhere between 400 and 500.

Level 500 means that you definitely know how to implement something in code that could be used correctly in XAML :) Also such level includes knowing how every tag and attribute in XAML works (like the problem with focus scopes, when you should know from the beginning that moving element to the new focus scope will change the behavior of standard WPF controls).

But any way - now we have some kind of competency levels for XAML writers :) Great!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting comment. I'd classify level 500 if you can doo al you suggest, plus do it without intellisense in the XAML ;)

Rat's Blog said...

hm...yep, you are right about intellisense :) Some time ago (about 2 years) I have been attending one local event on .NET and WPF (mostly of curiocity), and one of the speakers had some troubles with XAML and I had to shout thing like "...no-no, that won't work, replace with such text.." or "you are missing one comma there, and that is why it does not compile"... seems that he had level 300 then...