Integrating JSON with WPF/E
I've been playing a lot with creating dynamic XAML lately and while I'm a big fan of XML it can definitely get in the way when large chunks of a WPF/E document need to be added. Since WPF/E integrates nicely with JavaScript and ASP.NET AJAX can be used, is there any chance that you're considering adding a CreateFromJson() type method so that we could feed dynamic JSON objects representing the XAML objects to the control instead of XML strings?
A perfect scenario is calling Web Services with ASP.NET AJAX and adding the XAML returned to a canvas. If calls are returned as JSON rather than XML, the message payload is minimized substantially and it's a lot easier and more concise to work with in many cases. It would be a nice tie-in to ASP.NET AJAX IMHO although I realize it adds serialization/deserialization requirements...and that XML is a big part of WPF in general.
Hi Dan,
if you are using ASP.NET AJAX or AjaxPro you can return a string which contains an XML, so this is easy to do today. I don't see any reason to add a JSON format for the XAML code, but if you want it is very easy to write your own code for this. I did a C# implementation of the WPF/E elements and created such classes. Returning these with AjaxPro lets you get the JSON data. On the client I was using a common JSON to XML converter, and I had my XAML code... ;)
So, I'm not sure if this would be a big benefit when implemented in the plug-in which should be optimized to minimal size.
Michael
Right...I'm doing that now. However, the XAML can be fairly large and cumbersome to work with whereas JSON is much smaller over the wire. I don't think my feature request will ever get added, but it would be a nice feature to have to keep message sizes smaller (by orders of magnitude) and ties in nicely to ASP.NET AJAX Web Service calls.
Dan,
I had a look on a very large XAML document and created a ZIP of it what could be compared with the GZIP IIS feature for static files. I'm not sure if there is a big difference to a JSON format. A lot of the properties are set as attributes, and this will not be smaller when using JSON data format. So, I think Microsoft should concentrate more on features, plug-in bugs and maybe support in the Expression suite.
Michael
