Hello? Is Anyone Out There Writing Code?

Brian Lanham — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:15:29 GMT

I have been working on a graphics project for about a month now. Our initial tasks are focused on identifying and proving (or disproving) the high risk areas. With respect to graphics applications, I find a lot of risk in the nuances. For example, when one line overlaps another, can the overlapping line render with a curve to indicate the overlap?

I am 97% certain that almost anything we need/want to do on this project can be done successfully. However, I had a bad experience with GDI+ about a year ago. Although I am 1000% more confident that WPF will NOT have those problems, I am in the "trust but verify" mode. So I am proving these things.

I am completely frustrated with the lack of examples, especially the lack of examples in code. Everything seems to be done in XAML. Well the type of software that I am writing doesn't lend itself to doing all the drawing in XAML. As an example, I wanted to draw a line. Nothing fancy, just a line. I spent an hour looking for examples that draw lines programmatically. I found a few. I found about a dozen more that use XAML (with hard coded endpoints).

What happened to writing code?

I have really developed a bad taste over declarative programming. I didn't like it from the beginning and my frustrations with seemingly simple XAML tasks support my disdain for it. Oh, you want to know what a simple task is? I want to create multiple projects and reference one from another in a XAML file. You'd think that, if nothing else, would be easy. NOT!

Don't get me wrong. I think XAML is really amazing technology. I also see its place. In fact, I love the way I can create a ControlTemplate in code and then use XAML to define instantiation specifics for controls made from that template. Then, of course, I can actually instantiate a control from the template, with the XAML applied. That's pretty phly and might even be amazing (if I weren't so frustrated).

However, there is simply a lack of examples and samples doing work in code. So, if you know of a good reference where people are using WPF and writing code...please let me know. (Alternately, if you know of a good reference on connecting XAML to XAML across projects and doing dynamic, user-controlled WPF applications in XAML, please let me know that too.)