Yesterday I had one of those moment where one minute you’re super opinionated on something, only for someone to point out how things have changed and that you should re-evaluate your position – As much as I have my personal preferences on a lot of developer related topics, I try to listen to those around me and look at why they’re doing things their way, and whether I can adapt/learn/extend what I’m doing.
Yesterday in my post talking about CSS in Xamarin.Forms I made a comment that developers building for Xamarin.Forms should be using XAML and “if you’re doing it in code, you’re wasting everyone’s time”. Almost immediately after posting this I was following a related twitter thread (Adam’s thread on whether XAML is holding Xamarin.Forms back) and I saw a link to the work that Vincent has been doing on using declarative c# instead of XAML. This started with a discussion on the Xamarin forums: https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/123771/using-declarative-style-c-instead-of-xaml-should-xamarin-redirect-xaml-efforts-elsewhere? Then Vincent provided a link to his repo on Github: https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup
My issue with using C# to define layout is that out of the box it’s very difficult to construct layouts without it making it look like a jumbled mess – XAML makes the layout very clean and easy for any XAML developer to easily grok what’s going on. However, what Vincent has done is provide some simple extensions that make it possible to define the layout in a very fluent manner.
Whilst I still prefer, and would recommend using XAML, if you must use C# to define layouts, you should look at the work Vincent has done and perhaps leverage it in your code. Furthermore I’d love to see some metrics on whether there is a noticeable performance gain in using C# versus compiled XAML, and how to handle styles, templates and other resources in code.