Sparkle Extensibility API?
My interpretation of Microsoft’s vision for Sparkle is as a tool for designers while developers will use Visual Studio and they both will work on a Visual Studio project/solution. This is a focused approach but I’d love to see Sparkle spread it wings somewhat and be used in the varied scenarios that people dream up when given a tool with extensibility. The extensibility points that would be beneficial include:
- An extensibility API.
- Sparkle addin support
- The ability to extend the user interface with scenario specific functionality.
- The ability to define your own data binding source and a UI that supports that data source.
- Not having to be tied to a Visual Studio project to edit XAML files.
- The ability to embed scripts in XAML files instead of compiled C#/VB. Maybe this relates to the WPF/E plans, but allowing an arbitrary scripting language instead of JScript specifically would be beneficial.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time currently to experiment with Sparkle in depth. Paying work comes first, but man it looks promising.
Getting extensibility right is one of the hardest things you can do...once you've made yourself extensible you have to live with it forever. So, we decided not to make the product extensible at first. It is definitely high on our wish list.
Posted by John Gossman | 25 January 2006 11:29