The very beginning of chapter 6 in Victor Gaudioso’s book on Blend 2 discusses the MediaElement and goes into details regarding Independent mode.  Towards the end of this, he explains why one might decide to have the URI called in C# instead of XAML, using what essentially is an example of a typical media player – such as Winamp or Windows Media Player, where the application is programmed to look for the information after the user has given it input.  In his example, it was by dragging a video from the user’s My Documents, into the player, and the player interacts in such a way where it not only plays this content, knows its location, but also displays data which is stored within this media file.

Well towards the end, he explains that this cannot be done via XAML because the XAML is only rendered upon loading the application once, by default. 

At the very end of the section is a line:

“Technically XAML can be changed on a XAML EventTrigger, but that is beyond the scope of this book.”

I find this comment to be interesting.  Many – too many in fact – books that I’ve read start out with the obtuse beginning proclamation which has been used far longer than my own existance, “This book will tell you everything you need to know… ”  *twitch*

That statement immediately reminds me of one which I have in my memory from childhood.  We were purchasing the family’s first computer.  It was an Acer Intel Inside Pentium.  The salesman’s comment (I’m sure many of you may already know where I’m going with this) was that the computer was so advanced that we won’t need another.  Ever.  The hard drive will never run out of space.  The memory is so advanced that nobody’s computer will be as fast as our’s.

*twitch*

Back to Victor’s comment in his book.  The fact that this comment is even here, is a sign of the times.  People of the current times are more often than not aware that the possibility of the infinite where something has an end is nill.  There will always be more after something has “an end”.  If there is an end, one must conclude that there is more outside of the scope of the said object.

It truly wasn’t that long ago that many would be ashamed to even mention that something exists outside of their creation.  Its nice to see the changing times.

Chapter 4 of Victor’s book talks about XAML, C# and scratches at the surfave of both of these, including general information to make sure that the reader is able to follow further in the book regarding OOP(Object Oriented Programming) and in the subject regarding inheritance, he’s talking about superclasses and how the parent and children classes inherit the superclass in which they reside. He goes further into the analogies of how these work, and asks one to contemplate the pain of an inverse situation. He uses the example of fruit.

A superclass of “Fruit” as he describes, being that fruit is an edible container with the seeds of a plant inside. Oranges, Apples, etc. being children of the “Fruit” parent. In the case of inheritance, if Oranges and Apples are under the superclass of “Fruit” then both Apples and Oranges “know” that they are edible containers with seeds of their own plant. There is no need to “program” that individually when they are set as child-classes. If they were not set up as child classes, then one would have to individually tell each one, programatically, the properties of a fruit.

The inverse of this situation is one which I have encountered far too often – with much frustration, at that.

Many applications used – and still in very heavy use today, were often built reactionarily (… is that even a word?). What I mean by this is – there was a demand, and so came the birthing of some application or another. Every addition to this application was created as a reaction to a need.

Now, that doesn’t really sound bad on the surface. However, the reality of this is … not always good.
My day-after-new years-eve mind is having a difficult time coming up with a good example which would be easy to use, but the only things that I’m coming up with are so convoluted that most would get lost without diagrams.

Cleaning something of that nature up is much like many things – it might often just be easier to not even try to fix it and instead to start from scratch. This type of thing… I put up there with having a complex multi-page web-based application which has its styling willy nilly across the span of 200 aspx pages, 18 stylesheets and let’s not even talk about the markup styling done directly in the structure.