I'm not sure if I understand the question but maybe I can clear this up.

think of XAML as an XML description of the heirarchy of your applications objects. This means each XML element in XAML will map to a CLR object and each XML attribute in XAML will map to a CLR property e.g.

<Window Width="640" Height="480">
  <FlowPanel>
    <TextBox ID="myTextBox">
      The initial text in a text box
    </TextBox>
    <MyNonAvalonCLRObject></MyNonAvalonCLRObject>
  </FlowPanel>
</Window>

3 things can be done with the above xml

0) It can be converted to a tokenized binary that is essentialy the same as the markup but elements and attributes are converted to tokens, this can be used to speedup download or parsing of XAML

1) It can be loaded at runtime

object uiRoot = Parser.LoadXaml(myUIAsAString);

//and inspected at runtime
Window w = uiRoot as Window;
FlowPanel f = w.Content as FlowPanel;

TextBox t = f.Children[0];
//or
TextBox t2 = SimeClassIDontRemember.FindLogicalElement(w, "myTextBox") as TextBox;

2) It can be compiled to code that is compiled and linked to an application\library

//This is off the top of my head
class MyWindow: Window
  TextBox myTextBox;
  void InitializeUI() {
    Window window_0 = new Window();
      FlowPanel flowpanel_0 = new FlowPanel();
        myTextBox = new TextBox();
        myTextBox.TextRange.Text = "The initial text in a text box"
      flowpanel_0.Children.Add(myTextBox);
      flowpanel_0.Children.Add(obj_0);
    window_0.Height = 640;
    window_0.Width = 480;
    window_0.Content = f;
  }
}

That's all nice and well but how is that relevant to refactoring your UI without refactoring your code?

In XAML when you set the ID attribute on any XML element that maps to a UIElement;
the markup compiler generates a member variable named after the ID value.
additionaly you can query the UI tree for UIElements with ID = "somestring value"

If you design your UI carefuly and only assign ID's to elements relevant to your applications logic you can refactor the UI quite a bit and never look at your code twice.

Ifeanyi Echeruo [MSFT]
SDET

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

That sounds a bit like DHTML, where you can assign unique IDs to your HTML elements and refer to a specific element in JavaScript, no matter where it is in the document with something like:

document.all("tagID").value;