Just wanted to take this opportunity to brag that I predicted correctly. Well, kinda ...

Things have changed since June 12th. The comment I made at the end about the open source community having to catch up is off because people at Microsoft are openly talking about the technology even though Longhorn, the first OS to use XAML, is still at least two years away. Microsoft is taking the risk of "giving away" this new technology in order to solicit feedback from developers.

The word on XAML vs XUL is best left to guys like Wesner Moise and Joe Hewitt. I haven't read that much about it yet but I do know that unlike XUL, XAML does not use CSS, but appears to have an equivalent that is similar to CSS. Apparently a CSS-like system was in an early edition of XAML and then dropped it in favour of the new way.

From first glance it appears as though Microsoft wants to compete against the W3C rather than work with them. It looks as though the open source community should appreciate the two year warning. I wonder if they'll do anything about it ... two years is a pretty long time.

Update 10:20am Monday XAML and code can be mashed together to end up with one object. So you can set the object's visual properties in XAML and it's functional properties in code OR all of them in either. Don Box and Chris Anderson have a pretty good live demo of that on MSDN TV.