I’ve now included a “first cut” XAML parser (ultra simplistic) within v0.2 of my Mobile UI Framework.

Allows me to convert:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<DrawingPanel 
  xmlns="http://mobileui.codeplex.com/v1" 
  xmlns:sysDrawing="System.Drawing"
  DesiredSize="Unbound">

  <GradientRectangleElement DesiredSize="Unbound" StartColor="240,240,240" EndColor="200,80,0"/>

  <TextElement DesiredSize="400,500" Foreground="200,200,200" Text="Demo" Angle="315" AutoSize="True" 
                      HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center"/>
  
  <DrawingPanel DesiredSize="Unbound" Background="{null}">
    <DrawingPanel.LayoutEngine>
      <StackLayout Margin="8,4" Padding="4"/>
    </DrawingPanel.LayoutEngine>

    <ButtonBar Text="Animations" SecondaryText="Animate properties of graph primitives" 
                     DesiredSize="UnboundAxis, 80" Background="{null}"/>
    <ButtonBar Text="Trasitions" SecondaryText="Optimized bitmap animations" 
                     DesiredSize="UnboundAxis, 80" Background="{null}"/>
    <ButtonBar Text="Primitives" SecondaryText="Polygon, Ellipse, Image, Text" 
                     DesiredSize="UnboundAxis, 80" Background="{null}" />
    <ButtonBar Text="Behaviours" SecondaryText="Drag with slide" 
                     DesiredSize="UnboundAxis, 80" Background="{null}" Command="{Binding DragDemoCommand}"/>
    <ButtonBar Text="Layout" SecondaryText="Stack, Wrap and Radial" 
                      DesiredSize="UnboundAxis, 80" Background="{null}" Command="{Binding LayoutDemoCommand}"/>

  </DrawingPanel>

</DrawingPanel>

Into:

I was getting really sick of doing it the “old fashioned way”

So far I support simple value type converters (float, bool), pen and brush converters, size and padding converters, resource naming (x:Name), complex properties (DrawingPanel.LayoutEngine) and loading types from other CLR namespaces via XML namespace (xmlns:sysDrawing).