As part of its overall effort to promote greater interoperability, Microsoft is posting additional documentation of the Extensible Application Markup Language formats for advanced user experiences, enabling third parties to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server and tool products.  

The documentation is publicly available for free here.

It will help developers building non-Microsoft clients and servers to read and write XAML to process advanced user experiences, with animation, rich 2-D and 3-D graphics, and video, Microsoft officials said. Non-Microsoft servers can more easily generate XAML files to be handled, for example, by applications running on Windows client machines. In addition, non-Microsoft clients can be written more easily to interpret XAML files. This action will help ISVs create design tools and file format converters to read and write XAML.

Microsoft is making this documentation available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, which will allow developers of all types to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server or tool products without having to take a license or pay a fee to Microsoft.