Hi everyone. First, I am happy that this topic came around, it means a lot to see this involvement on how to improve the learning and collaboration experience here.
Second, I want to share my own learning path sinceIi started this role on the Forum. When i first joined UiPath I was a QA engineer for Orchestrator so my Studio knowledge in terms of developing was limited. I mostly knew the activities that would interact with Orchestrator. When I took this role (managing the Forum and providing help for all UiPath products) I started with the most simple questions here (the ones on the Rookies category) since I was a rookie myself. Based on what was asked I started to develop in Studio and give the .xaml as a solution. I remember one of my first solutions was a simple sample of how to use invoke code: How to Use Invoke Code
After trying myself how to solve a topic I then started to answer the more advanced questions. I learned a lot from the answers of our now MVPs, back then leaders on the Forum.
I learned the most when I started creating my first Robot in production (with the help of my colleagues from RPA implementation team). At the beginning, when a topic was created, my first question was Did you complete the Foundation training in Academy?. So I thought I could see at a glance if we would have some sort of integration between the Academy and the Forum. So this is how Robo-Forum was created. We have improved it over time and now it’s easier for you to request to be part of the foundation, orchestrator or advanced groups and for us to add you to those groups after the Robot checks your progress in Academy platform. The first version was done with UI Automation and I found out sooner rather than later that it is not that reliable (comparing to how it is implemented now - API calls between the platforms).
TL;DR
What I am trying to say is that I personally don’t know the right answer in this case. Some learn by doing, others by following a template (in our case xaml files) but I think we can find a balance. In this case, having xaml files may bring value short term. As you mentioned above in this thread, one of the best practices is to search before you post. We all know that not everyone does that and we cannot really force people to do so (maybe they need an answer/solution on their specific app, maybe they are having a bad day and they are not so patient or whatever reason). But having only the xamls as solutions, long term can bring more questions (and even errors when trying to run it) as the UiPath versions become incompatible, new features are released etc.
Thanks again for bringing this up! 