[taspeotis]

I was really surprised to read this:

    We have rebuilt the XAML language service on top of the .NET
    Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") to provide an improved XAML editing
    experience with rich IntelliSense that is faster and more reliable.

My understanding was that Roslyn was heavily geared towards languages that are largely procedural like C# and VB.NET. So functional languages, like F#, aren't suited to being parsed by Roslyn. But all of a sudden they're using Roslyn with a declarative language (XAML)?

[useerup]

Having used XAML recently for purposes not even related to WPF, I can definitively see what this might bring.

XAML is at its core a format to describe an object graph declaratively. The objects can be any .NET object.

The current XAML editor already understands a lot about the objects you describe - i.e. it loads the assembly and introspects the types to give you intellisense while editing. The current one is not without its quirks and bugs, however.

I'd be thrilled to have a new, robust editor that intrinsically understands classes, properties, value converters etc to offer more assistance when writing raw XAML.

[seanmcdirmid]

XAML is a markup language, that counts as declarative, but you can think of it as a subtraction of C# (the ability to create instances and bind their properties), it doesn't add any advanced declarative programming features and definitely nothing fancy type-wise as in F#.

I don't know what they did, but it seems reasonable that it would share a type checker with C# but have a unique parser.