I’ve been messing around with a Silverlight 3 app that allows you to open and view XAML files located on your locale machine. Sure, you can do that already with your favorite editor including Visual Studio but I wanted to show more information easily so the viewer did not have to continually copy and paste or search help and loose the whole picture of the XAML file while they learn about a particular piece of it..

If you’ve worked with XAML for any length of time you develop the ability to quickly look at some XAML markup and know what’s going on. But do you remember the first time you did that? How strange it looked?

Well, this application is geared towards those who are not XAML masters and want to know what all the tags mean. As the user hovers over certain key words in the rendered XAML doc a callout pops up with some useful and concise help. If they want more information they can click on a “msdn” icon and another browser tab opens up with the Silverlight docs for that particular item.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action…

The Callout blurbs are from a schema file named XamlPresentation2006.xsd which is from Visual Studio 2005 before Microsoft changed the way Intellisense is handled. This file has WPF related info but its as close a source of XAML ‘keyword’ information that I could find for Silverlight. This is the info that is displayed in tooltips while hovering over keywords. There is no info on some of the newer features like Visual State Manager but all in all it covers things fairly well.

Unfortunately, the XamlPresentation2006.xsd is 3.6 MB large. The app uses WebClient to download it on startup so I just can’t embed the app in this post as some may be on dialup connections.

You can run it from here if your interested. Just click the “Open XAML file” and go find a XAML file in your file system. – Cheers!