The Existential Horror of a XAML Rewrite

Description

A three-panel stick-figure comic from 'JONCOMICS.NET' illustrating a developer's painful experience with XAML. In the first panel, a character in a red shirt asks, 'Where's Timmy?'. A woman with blonde hair replies, 'Rewriting his code in XAML.' The second panel shows the first character screaming in horror, 'OH-GOD NO'. The final panel depicts the horrified character saving a crying child, Timmy, who is attempting to hang himself with a rope in front of a computer monitor. The monitor displays a block of notoriously verbose XAML code, starting with multiple 'xmlns' namespace declarations. The comic uses dark humor to exaggerate the frustration and poor developer experience associated with XAML, a Microsoft technology for defining user interfaces. For senior developers, especially those from the .NET world, the joke is instantly relatable. It satirizes the language's verbosity and complexity, which often made UI development feel tedious and painful compared to more modern alternatives

Common Tags

DeveloperHumor RefactoringPain WPFApplications TechnicalDebt FrameworkChurn

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick XAML is proof that you can have a declarative UI language so verbose that by the time you've finished defining the namespaces, the business requirements have already changed twice

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

XAML is proof that you can have a declarative UI language so verbose that by the time you've finished defining the namespaces, the business requirements have already changed twice
Anonymous

Timmy just discovered XAML; now every ResourceDictionary is a land-mine and I’m one binding error away from explaining to the VP why changing a font size added 300 MB to the RAM graph
Anonymous

After 15 years in the industry, you realize the real reason Microsoft deprecated Silverlight wasn't technical debt - it was to prevent a class action lawsuit from developers who developed PTSD from debugging two-way bindings and dependency property precedence in 10,000-line XAML files
Anonymous

XAML: where you need three namespace declarations, a resource dictionary, and a binding converter just to center a button. The real tragedy isn't that Timmy rewrote his code in XAML - it's that he probably added 10x more lines to accomplish the exact same thing, and now every UI change requires scrolling through an XML forest of Grid.Row and Grid.Column attributes. At least with HTML/CSS you can pretend the verbosity serves a purpose
Anonymous

“Rewriting it in XAML” is architect-speak for moving your logic into Styles, your state into DependencyProperties, and your bugs into silent Binding errors in the Output window
Anonymous

Nothing says rewrite like trading 200 lines of C# for 2,000 lines of XAML with five xmlns spells, an mc:Ignorable charm, and a binding that fails silently until prod
Anonymous

XML rewriting: where a boolean flag demands its own namespace, and your IDE scrolls into the abyss
@honmiv 5y

Eeee uwwwppppp
@cheburgenashka 5y

Before OAS/RAML — SOAP service in WSDL was way easier than pseudo REST by PHP monkeys. You would instead write your own XSD parser faster than negotiate a spec with them or reach 10% compliance with HTTP/REST semantics (unless you supposed to consume SOAP service written in PHP crap that is just printing it via strings concatenation.) Today's situation with REST API not much better. You still have SPAs that can only accept HTTP 200 and the rest codes to panic.
@cheburgenashka 5y

How old are you kiddo?
1. @RiedleroD 5y
  
  guess lol
  
  @RiedleroD 5y
  
  found his steam profile… He's active since 2011, so I guess not a kid lol.
@RiedleroD 5y

you would do everyone a favour if you would stop using unnecessary reaction gifs.
@cheburgenashka 5y

Farter*
@cheburgenashka 5y

Is it only kids and furries here?
1. @RiedleroD 5y
  
  mostly