title: WPF without XAML
body: <p>Architecturally, I think WPF is pretty amazing. In general, I'm a big fan of the underlying rendering/animation inner workings. The flexibility of the templating and styling set up is pretty impressive.</p>
  
  <p>But I loathe XAML - I feel like it complicates many things. I've used it on large and small applications and I've found myself many times trying to figure out how to do something in XAML for which the underlying principle is basic but the syntax is quirky. Not only that, but I've wondered many times how heavy certain parts of the parsing/binding are. (I know it's compiled, but I'm not sure how much is still evaluated at runtime)</p>
  
  <p>XAML is just one way of building and loading the visual tree. Are there any frameworks for simplifying building the visual tree in a non-XML, code-based (but still largely declarative) way? Specifically, I'm interested in frameworks that mitigate any of the following issues while retaining an MVVM approach:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Strongly typed binding. Specify that the ViewModel must conform to a specific type. I assume BaseBinding uses reflection under the hood and I'm a bit skeptical as to the speed of that, not to mention broken bindings being annoying.  </p></li>
  <li><p>Faster binding, non-<code>INotifyPropertyChanged</code> binding. It seems like some sort of <code>BindableProperty&lt;T&gt;</code> could be created and the binding could listen directly to that rather than receiving all ViewModel property changes. And the use of a direct callback versus a string argument would also seem to be advantageous.  </p></li>
  <li><p>A different approach to resource management; again, strongly typed dictionaries of some sort could be pretty nice. I'd almost like to see styles as lambdas or something to capture the strongly typed aspect.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>In summary, any frameworks that are non-XAML based, fit well with MVVM, and are strongly typed?</p>