Microsoft Standardizes XAML Across UWP and Xamarin @ InfoQ
"Announced during BUILD 2017, Microsoft has made public the first draft of the XAML Standard, a markup dialect meant to unify how user interface elements are defined.
Microsoft wants to unify some of the existing XAML dialects, planning to create version 1.0 some time later this year. After that, they plan on enhancing UWP and Xamarin.Forms (iOS, Android) to support the standard, making it possible to share UI definitions between the frameworks."
XAML was originally crated for WPF, but WPF is not part of unification plan. Instead, suggestion is to try converting WPF to UWP first.
All this is not even remotely close to usability of original visual controls and original Visual Basic.
There is just too much complexity now, since platforms are different. It is amazing that it works. And C# is a productive language and tool-set.
Web controls are also coming, in browsers, as well as in frameworks and libraries like React and Angular. Web and native can even be mixed by React Native, Appcelerator Titanium or Telerik NativeScript. The only possible common element seems to be JavaScript... Then there are "bots" with new class of text and voice based UI.
Ideally, extensible
semantic web based controls, and TypeScript-like JavaScript could enable a whole new class of
modular, transform-able & compose-able apps/services. Technically this is possible even now, just not simple.
