I have heard off and on that there is come confusion with XAML?. With any luck, the following article that I located today will help to shed some light on this situation.

I recently answered a question something like the one above for an Australian user group, but I know this question isn’t unique to Australian developers, so I figured I’d post my take here for a broader audience. Hopefully this is interesting or relevant!

Whenever we talk about Avalon and XAML together, it’s important to understand the distinction between the two. Avalon is our strategic next generation graphics subsystem, based on Direct3D. On the other hand, XAML is a markup language for succinctly describing a hierarchy of instantiated CLR objects and properties. It’s true that XAML came out of the Avalon team, but there’s no hard-wired link between the two. In theory at least, you could use XAML to construct Windows Forms UI; in fact, the Windows Workflow Foundation technology just announced their plans to support XAML for building workflows. Turning this around the other way, everything you write in XAML could alternatively be written in any other .NET language. If you don’t want to use XAML, then that’s fine by us - use C#, VB or even COBOL if your perversions run that way. So it’s simplest to think of Avalon and XAML as two completely separate technologies that just happen to have been introduced at the same time. [Read the rest]