My Software Studio

If, like me, you want to learn how to develop using Windows Presentation Foundation for your user interfaces you’ll find that it’s more like a learning cliff than a curve. My two biggest stumbling blocks are:

• My experience with WinForms.
• Lack of tools to just make things happen.

Prior experience.

Josh Smith explained this point eloquently in his article “Why use WPF if it is not RAD yet” by stating:

For those of us who approach WPF with a strong background in Windows Forms, however, you are pretty much required to remove your brain from your skull, rotate it 180 degrees, and put it back in.

RAD Tools

The hard-core WPF guru’s who can pump out markup with their eyes closed will probably scoff at the idea but, I do sometimes find it easier to learn how to do something by looking at how the generated markup looks for a simple solution. It gives you a frame of reference to start learning and extending from. A lot of the work that needs to get done in XML does seem a bit tedious and overwhelming.

Now what?

Neither one of these challenges are insurmountable it just takes some time and effort. A bit of patience to unlearn some things that have become reflex and knowing that working with the markup directly rather than depending on RAD tools will, in the end, give me a much better understanding of WPF. Until then let’s get to the good stuff that can make the journey a little smoother.

Blogs

Blogs are your friends. Keeping an eye on them will help keep you up to speed on things that you may need to know but didn’t know you had to ask about. Some of my favourites are:

Josh Smith on WPF. His blog is chock full up WPF articles, examples, tips, apps, you name it.

Learn WPF. I mainly use this site as the source for my free stuff. It was from here that I discovered Inkscape a free graphics application which can be used in conjunction with ViewerSVG to create and import .svg files into my applications as xaml. Apparently Inkscape will get a xaml export but till then ViewerSVG does a good job.

Designer WPF. Lots of articles here.

Clip Art

It won’t take you long to realise that using bitmap images is not as cool as it used to be. For menus and tree views it my still cut it but now that we can go big vector graphics are the way to go. The problem being that I just don’t have the time to spend drawing nice ones.

Check out Open Clip Art Library. all the files have bot a .png and .svg version available for download which in conjunction with ViewerSVG gives you a seamless solution to getting some nice images into your apps.

Code Project

If you don’t know about Code Project then go there now. Yes, right now. Click here.

Among all the WPF samples and articles you’ll find this gem:

Sacha Barber’s very helpful 5-part newbie guide to WPF:

WPF: A Beginner’s Guide - Part 1 of n
An introduction into the WPF layout system

WPF : A Beginners guide part 2 of n
An introduction into XAML / code and WPF resources

WPF : A Beginners guide part 3 of n
An introduction into RoutedEvents / RoutedCommands

WPF: A Beginner’s Guide - Part 4 of n
An introduction into WPF Dependancy Properties

WPF: A Beginner’s Guide - Part 5 of n
An introduction into WPF Databinding

WPF: A Beginner’s Guide - Part 6 of n
An introduction into WPF Styles And Templates

And the rest?

There are lots more good resources out there but I’ll sign off with these and hopefully you’ll leave any of your favourites that weren’t mentioned here as comments to this post.