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.