According to Charles Petzold, WPF is the main platform for Windows programming nowadays. The only reason why one might still want to program WinForms is if you want the app to run on a maximum of machines.
Petzold says he was resistant to XAML when he came to it first. But now, over the years, he is very comfortable with it and uses it a lot. You should give a chance to XAML. Interestingly, he took in his talk the exact opposite approach from his book: Starting with XAML only, and then only moving on to code.
Showing loose XAML examples into the web browser.
Session is very basic so far, introductory from 0.
The tool XAML Cruncher (made by Petzold) now allows saving XAML scripts (like snippets) for demos etc...
Talking about device independant units vs pixels and DPI.
Showing expanded property syntax.
Petzold shows a trick to add a hyphen to long words only if needed (on a wrapping textblock).
Showing transforms. Session is very basic so far, but it's kind of nice to have a refresh on very basic topics. Considering changing to the Silverlight session after the break, not sure yet.
Talking about images and DPI. Image sizing much more reliable than in HTML.
Showing emboss and engrave effects with 2 TextBlocks on top of each other and a RenderTransform on one.
To illustrate animations, Petzold shows a video of a lyric performance while the partitiion is shown in synch.
Summary
This is a great session for people who want to discover WPF from scratch. I can recommend the recorded session to beginners.
Print | posted on Sunday, October 26, 2008 10:56 PM