Silverlight.FX 2.1 navigation

Honestly, I'm torn between loving the declarative emphasis of Silverlight.FX--expressive, implementation-agnostic, terse--and recoiling in horror from how much it depends on string literals for commanding and now addressing/navigation. Also of concern, the MVC stuff follows ASP.MVC's conventions that make type name and file location semantically significant. (E.g., to have a Product controller, you need a type named ProductController in your /Controllers directory. Urgh.) There's a point at which convention-over-configuration strays into anarchy, and I think the ASP.NET pattern has passed it.

Granted, Silverlight is tangled up with xaml and must remain so, if only so it can roundtrip through Blend until something better comes along. This keeps its content quite close to text. And, maybe my love of Resharper has addicted me to static typing to an unhealthy degree, to the point that I want everything reflectable and typed, and I want it yesterday. But am I wrong to be creeped out by the strings? What makes this palatable? Is the theory: "It's acceptably safe to use strings for bindings, so long as they are sufficiently prominent, because their prominence implies that they are unlikely to fail without someone noticing?" (Much as many teams don't unit-test UI's, because the cost of high-fidelity testing is high, and manual testing gives it "enough" coverage.)

I don't get it.

Of course, xaml strings are not always strings. You can do some nifty things with type converters. But then again, type converters are a form of imperative code that's sufficiently subtle to let you THINK you're declarative and whatnot, when in fact you're nearly as entangled with imperative implementations as you ever were. Indeed, ever since a serendipitous typo, I refer to them as "type coverters".

And really, to the extent that they seem "nifty", most things you do with type converters seem so only because there isn't more elegant support in xaml for polymorphism. A richer language would erase (or at least subsume them) in a righteous flash of holy fire.

Uncle Bob, professional opinionator

Uncle Bob is back to his version of talk-radio for the blogosphere. Kernels of truth, whole gallons of certainty.

It's remarkable how many people get into definitional tugs-of-war over "professionalism" without citing the original, technical (if you will) meaning of professional.

Classically, if your vocation doesn't have an professional organization, government licensing requirements, and a code of professional ethics, among other things, you're not a professional. Plumbers are; coders aren't.

In my favorite clarifying example, there's a deep undertone of dry humor to the phrase "oldest profession", probably lost on most people today.

Thus, in the classical sense, anyway, an appeal for professionalism is an appeal to become establishment, institutional, blessed by the powers that be. Culturally (though perhaps not politically) it's conservative. I don't know that Uncle Bob intends this, but if so, it's seems to me this is not what Agile needs.

Craftsmanship, yes; ethics, of course; Marick's Artisanal Retro-Futurism x Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism, very possibly. Speechifying and invective... no thanks.

(Note that I haven't read his actual keynote. Perhaps the speechifying is less in the speech than in the blog.)