4a2eac7e_lk_vNext__post_2009__wish_list__Description
[Title] Orchestrations: Get rid of the XML representation [Description] 
Tools like Oslo's MGrammar would make it easier to directly manipulate XLang/s code, making it unnecessary to also have an XML representation. The XLang/s representation is much more readable than the XML The XLang/s representation by itself would be easier to work with merge tools. Currently, resolving conflicts/merging changes in orchestrations is very painful because the XML is not merge-tool-friendly. XML representation of orchestrations is mostly a repetition of the XLang/s code. Some information is only in the XML, but it could be moved to the XLang/s by using code annotations. Some tools will still need access to the XML, so there should still be a way to programatically generate, in memory, the XML representation (as it can be currently be done with XSharpP.exe). However, the XML representation should be hidden from orchestration developers, it should not be stored in source control and it should only be generated on the fly when needed by a tool (this means all tools that manipulate ODX files would need to be updated to do this conversion) Another benefit of this is that it would help solving a frequent bug we encounter: while editing an orchestration, some parts of the code becomes invalid and replaced by "#error "The expression you have entered is invalid". When this happen, we have to do some modification in the orchestration designer that will force it to regenerate XLang/s code from the XML representation. If the designer worked directly with XLang/s code instead of converting to/from XML, this source of potential conversion problems would disappear.
Nootaikok's blog: My BizTalk vNext (post-2009) wish list
Description