When having Avalon installed it adds a few new project templates to my Visual C# 2005 express, with which avalon applications can be made. Avalon is a Window system which uses xml files to define a form. At the moment I couldn’t find a designer neither reference to it in the help files and assume it isn’t implemented yet, which is rather a pain for creating a form by editing Xml by hand is just a pain: Xml is hard to write and I am just too dependant on the user friendlyness of the form designer.
When compiling Avalon generates classes and serialized data files in your application to replace the Xml files.
So what does it basicly do? Lets you design your forms easily (although there isn’t a proper designer yet) maintaining a good performance by replacing the slow Xml files by generated classes and serialized resources compile-time.
Having a few test applications decompiled and having looked at the sdk it seems that Avalon can do practicly the same as the current Windows.Forms dll.
So now I wonder, in what way would Avalon be better than using the great current form designer and the Windows.Forms dll?
Avalon is a vector-based graphics library, which means that it doesn’t work with bitmaps and absolute values; every measurement is relative. You can scale anything to really huge or really small proportions. For example, in Windows.Forms you would say, “this and this control is placed at (20,20) and has width 100 and height 15. No matter the resolution of your screen or size of your windows, it would always be that big. Avalon allows to automatically scale your controls by using percentages or one of the lay-out managers.
It’s all a bit like the Java (and GNOME) lay-out managers.
I can create exactly the same using Windows.Forms although I guess there would be some things that would be harder to do in window forms than in avalon.