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Thursday, August 26, 2004

WFML : A DFM equivalent for .NET?

Check out http://windowsforms.net/articles/wfml.aspx. This is a component that can use XML markup to "design" forms - so you can have your form design separate from your code! Very much like Delphi DFMs - and the event model also expects handlers inside of the .CS class.
No designer for it, of course - and probably no support in Longhorn either - XAML does this in Longhorn anyhow. But you know what, this does one thing that I've always wanted in Delphi - allows me to put comment in the form design code - i.e. comment out a component easily. Even in the .NET IDEs, you can't really muck about with the "InitializeComponent()" code - they don't like it too much, for reasons I can't understand. (If you're parsing, parse it right, dammit. So what if I chose to comment something out?)
But the app is *slow*. No, this isn't just .NET - XML parsing in general is slow, and then all the stuff like dynamically creating stuff is slower.

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