XAML for UI & .rc files
I was never a Win32 developer, so I don’t know a ton about the .rc format…but this was an interesting comment that I found on Pete Brown’s “WPF and Silverlight Convergence” post from Philip the Duck:
@Steven: "I personally feel that Microsoft has revolutionized the way user interfaces are developed."
I absolutely love the way XAML comes full-circle (conceptually) back to the old "resource file" model (an RC file compiled to RES and linked into the EXE) first used in Windows 1.x, which provided a scalable UI model for dialogs ("dialog units" rather than pixels) and separated the UI ("view") from the code ("controller"). This resource model was introduced way back in the Win16/DOS 3.1 days of yore (1985-ish) but it's still used today in Win32/64 C++ native application development.
Sadly, VB and later WinForms completely bypassed the resource file model, resulting in hard-coded, non-scalable non-customisable UIs, so it warmed the cockles to see the concept brought back via XAML in WPF back in 2001 and now in Silverlight.
Of course XAML is a modern XML format and beyond comparison to the old text-based RC file format in terms of funtionality, but the few of us old DOS/Win16 farts still around, who cut our teath on the 1st Edition of Petzold's Programming Windows, smile at the similarity. RC resource files are dead - long live XAML resource files!