XAML - What's the point of (typing) it?

Question

I am currently looking into learning WPF and Silverlight. So far I have been developing in Delphi and C# (Winforms). While looking at some books about WPF and watching some introductory videos online, I am getting the impression that this XAML thing is quite a step backwards in terms of efficiency and usability (for the developer). Especially in the online videos, people are happily typing XAML code for creating forms and controls, which I thought was a technique that became mostly obsolete with the arrival of visual form designers etc. long ago. Why would I want to create a button or a grid by typing a textual representation in XAML when using a form designer is so much faster? Why type a color or a font name when it is much faster to choose it from a dropdown list in a property inspector? Are real-world application GUIs really developed by typing XAML?

I am sure I am missing something here, though I can not figure out what ...

Answer 1

It's pretty much the same as writing raw HTML manually as opposed to using a WYSIWYG editor: having a much finer control over the outcome, without the need to go through unnecessary loops with the editor.