Breakout Session: A Lap around Avalon

Well, due to my tablet side session I got to this session pretty late.  It was PACKED.  I stood for some time until I saw someone leave, then took a seat.  This session was much like the Lap around Indigo session in that it was providing a foundation of the basic principles of the Presentation Framework that could be expanded upon by the rest of the sessions. 

To be honest I didn’t follow much of what was going on in the session.  There was a lot of XAML code being thrown around and pasted about to build up this example application.  I did get a sense of the power of XAML, but not much else.  I don’t think I was too into the session and it doesn’t help that I don’t like coming in at the middle of things.  Avalon was not something I paid too close attention to prior to the PDC so I was coming into this one pretty blind.

Some things I did take away from this:

• You can create business objects, then reference those business objects in your XAML code with a namespace and use that to create custom elements to use in binding and presentation.
• You can create custom templates for data and controls to help control the display and rendering of just about everything.  He created a “data” template for a object represented by a business object and everywhere that object would be displayed it used the template.  This seemed a lot like CSS to me.
• They have the idea of UserControls similar to ASP.Net.
• It seemed that developers would create the business objects and data objects and then let designers use tools to layout the UI, which would generate XAML to compile into the final application.

Sorry, this one session was a little sparse in my note taking.