What Exactly Is XAML?

XAML stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language.

It's a declarative language that we use to define and initialize objects in WPF. Think of it as a blueprint for your user interface.

Just like HTML is used to structure content on the web, XAML is used to structure your UI components in a WPF form.

Also, keep in mind that

• WPF is a framework for building rich desktop applications

• XAML is an XML-based language for defining UI elements in WPF.

​

XAML has a very similar syntax to HTML to define components with angle brackets and to fill in attributes inside the opening tag.

But unlike HTML, XAML is strongly tied to the .NET framework and therefore is used with .NET languages like C#, VB.NET, and IronPython.

Obviously, it has different names for components and attributes than HTML, but you'll see this in a moment.

Why Do We Use XAML in WPF?

The beauty of XAML lies in the ability to separate the UI design of your forms from the code logic.

This separation makes it much easier to manage and maintain your application, especially at scale.

​

Designers can work on the look and feel of the XAML forms, while developers can focus on the backend code and think about all the logic and everything they need for the form.

But in your case, you're going to be both the designer and developer💪.

Behind-Code in WPF

Also, keep in mind that you can create your WPF forms by only using Python code without any XAML, and it's usually referred to as using Behind-Code when we create WPF forms with python code.

But it's going to be a mess as you would need to declare a lot of classes and fill in all the properties one by one. But sometimes it might be necessary, and we will dive into that during the course.

But in general, we'll use XAML for our main front-end and python to populate data and interaction for the form in the back-end.

Learn More in Full Lesson

There is no way I can describe everything about XAML in this email, so I highly recommend you to Click Here to Watch the Full lesson.

​

It's best if you follow along the video and try to code it yourself. That's how you learn XAML x10 times faster