XML comments and Blend

It’s great to see how Expression Blend V2 improved over V1. One small thing I noted which makes life easier is the preservation of XML comments entered before a XAML element. This allows documenting an element in a ResourceDictionary, and then moving the element in another ResourceDictionary without losing the comments. That’s possible in the Resources tab of Blend, on the right.

Note however that only the XML comment located immediately before the resource will be moved around. This comment may have more than one line, so it’s not an issue, but it’s good to know.

Note also that using a XML comment to separate sections in your XAML document is still not a good idea, as moving things around will mess the formatting up!

Since I started studying WPF 3D with Charles Petzold’s book, I thought it would be interesting to open a 3D XAML file in Blend, and had the great pleasure to discover a whole lot of functionalities I didn’t know were there. I didn’t play with all of them already, and I am not sure how (and if) you can create 3D elements, but you can for sure move them around, rotate them, change the textures and colors, place lights and change its color, etc… Obviously it’s not Zam 3D, but it’s great to have all that in the same WPF editor!

Every day I spend with Blend, I like it more!