Will there be any documentation for the XAML binary format "XBF"?

Question

Build announced that Xaml will be compiled. This affects my work a bit. We do reading and editing XAML files inside Appx packages. So, I downloaded the previews and made a quick sample application, and, indeed, no XAML file is visible. Instead, I have this weird .xbf file for every XAML page. Using a hex editor, I can see familiar things, such as XML namespaces for XAML, but this is not like BAML, so there is no documentation for it. A completely new format.

Is there (or will be) Microsoft release some form of documentation about this new binary XAML format?

Answer 1

It is planned to provide documentation on the format. To create a format, there is an API. If you are a tool or some other intermediate process, you can instruct your developers to disable XBF generation (in the proj DisableXbfGeneration = true file), and then do the intermediate work, then you will be responsible for creating the XBF in your process.

Answer 2

This tool ( http://xamldecompiler.codeplex.com/ ) allows you to dig in format. It was just a matter of time.

Answer 3

Microsoft will ultimately have to publish the data or face the fact that they again have an unfair advantage with their tools over other developers of tool developers. Until then, reflection is your best friend, but they seemed to be trying a little harder to complicate the work for obvious reasons.

Answer 4

According to this post last month there is no support for loading xbf files, so you have to load your objects using Application.LoadComponent, convert to XAML using XamlWriter, make changes and then save to xbf using XamlBinaryWriter.