WPF

When Should You Use WPF?

Scott Dorman — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:52:15 GMT

It’s pretty clear that Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is here to stay. In fact, use of WPF is becoming more popular and frequent, particularly now that Silverlight 2.0 is on the horizon. The problem is that there has been very little guidance available to help you decide when to use the various UI technologies available. There is however, some unofficial help in the form of this blog post and this white paper.

Here is the comparison matrix from Michael’s blog post:

	WPF	WPF XBAP	Silverlight	ASP.Net + AJAX
Client	Windows XP SP2 (With .Net 3.0) & Vista	Internet Explorer + Windows XP SP2 (with .Net 3.0) & Vista	FireFox, Mac Safari, Internet Explorer	Any Web Browser
Deployment	Downloadable Installer or ClickOnce	Runs in Internet Explorer secure sandbox	One-time install of Silverlight plug-in	Web Page
When to use	Programs that need access to Windows desktop files.	Intranet applications for Windows-oriented companies.	Rich Internet Applications for public-facing web sites	General-purpose public-facing web sites

WPF Application Quality Guide

Scott Dorman — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:39:05 GMT

Since WPF was released it has seen a fairly rapid adoption but not much in the way of guidance. The WPF team at Microsoft is hoping to change that with the release of the WPF Application Quality Guide. The guide is going to be released in stages and will be updated based on feedback provided by the community. While the first release is still missing a lot, it does provide some good tips on setting up your application for automated testing.

They also provide a good list of tools for performance profiling:

Using Performance Profiling Tools for WPF.

Event Trace. Use this tool for analyzing events and generating event log files.

Perforator. Use this tool for analyzing rendering behavior.

ETW Trace Viewer. Use this tool to record, display, and browse Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) log files in a WPF user-interface format.

Visual Profiler. Use this tool for profiling the use of WPF services, such as layout and event handling, by elements in the visual tree.

Working Set Analyzer. Use this tool for analyzing the working set characteristics of your application.

WPF Virtual Bootcamp

Scott Dorman — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 02:01:03 GMT

I just came across a post by Tim Sneath announcing the WPF Virtual Bootcamp. This is a three-day virtual training course that covers all aspects of WPF as part of MIX University. The best part about this bootcamp is that it's completely free. This was originally delivered on the Redmond campus earlier this year to a small invited audience and features:

A keynote from Ian Ellison-Taylor, the general manager responsible for WPF, Silverlight and client platform tools.
Introductory sessions on core WPF topics from Ian Griffiths and others.
In-depth training by talented and knowledgeable speakers from the product group such as Beatriz Costa and Kevin Moore.
Five sessions on real-world experiences from early adopters who built applications ranging from The North Face kiosk application to the new Yahoo Messenger client.
Nine self-paced hands-on labs you can use as a starting point for your own experimentation and further learning.

Of course, you will need Silverlight installed in order to watch the videos. If you go through the bootcamp, be sure to let Microsoft know what you liked and didn't like about it as they are planning on doing another one next year that will be updated to include further content around Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.0.

WPFwiki

Scott Dorman — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:54:58 GMT

The guys over at Xceed, makers of the powerful yet free Xceed DataGrid for WPF have just launched the WPFwiki. The wiki was created to be a community resource for developers working with Windows Presentation Foundation. Even though the site was just launched, the idea started in 2003 when the WPF DataGrid was just starting to be developed. As the developers encountered problems and questions that they felt would be of common interest, it was recorded in a database along with the answer. In March 2007, the WPF FAQ on WPFwiki.com was created and over 100 initial questions and answers were published, in Wiki form, for the benefit of developers working with WPF.

In addition to a large WPF FAQ, WPFwiki is also a great place to find WPF related resources. From books to blogs and even some college classes, if it relates to WPF and is good, chances are it will be listed.

To help make sure the contributions to the WPF FAQ keep coming in and are of good quality, Xceed is planning to award prizes to the top contributors a couple of times a year. The prizes include product licenses, iPods, and more.

Expression products now part of MSDN

Scott Dorman — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:19:00 GMT

When Microsoft announced the new Expression product line, a decision was made to keep these out of the MSDN subscriptions. The theory behind this was that these tools are designed for graphics designers and didn't have a place in the MSDN subscriptions.

This decision was widely criticized by the development community and Microsoft has finally realized their mistake and announced that Expression Web and Expression Blend will now be available at no extra charge to all MSDN Premium Subscribers, including customers with the "VS Professional with MSDN Premium" subscription. Expression Design and Expression Media are included with MSDN subscriptions with Team Suite.

The next release of Visual Studio will also ship with integrated designers for HTML, WPF, and WPF/E. The HTML designer is actually the same one that ships with Expression Web.

Expression Web is available now to all MSDN Premium subscribers. Expression Blend will be available later in Q2 2007, sometime after the release of Expression Studio.

Tech·Ed Technical Tracks - There's WPF!

Scott Dorman — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 02:55:00 GMT

Earlier this month, I posted a summary of the technical tracks available for Tech·Ed 2007. As I was putting the summary together, I noticed that WPF was not listed. Well, Rob Relyea, the PM on the WPF team noticed my post and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now officially listed under the "Developer Tools and Technologies" track.

WPF Reflection control

Scott Dorman — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:59:00 GMT

One of the cooler "eye-candy" type effects possible with WPF is the ability to create reflections. Reflections can be made of pretty much anything and are relatively simple to create. There is a good tutorial on creating reflections using Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend.

The drawback to creating reflections is that you have to repeat the steps for every reflection. Fortunately, one of the developers at Infragistics has created a custom control that allows you to easily create reflections. I have used this control... it works reasonably well and sure beats doing the reflections by hand.

WPF Datagrid control

Scott Dorman — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:59:00 GMT

Anyone who has been using WPF has, by now, realized that one of the most versatile controls in Windows Forms is missing! I'm referring to the DataGridView. The WPF ListView does have a very powerful Grid View mode that can be used to get around this limitation for a lot of situations.

However, for those times when you really do need the power and flexibility of a true data grid, you were out of luck unless you wanted to host the Windows Forms control.

All of that changed at the end of January when Xceed launched the first publicily available DataGrid component for WPF absolutely free, with an unlimited number of licenses per company. The free license is a perpetual license that includes royalty-free distribution, bug fixes, and upgrades. The only requirement is that you register with your real name and work email address.

I just started using this grid a few days ago and I can say that the power and flexibility offered are incredible. It already provides some great features and Xceed is busy working on the next release that will include some of the more frequently requested features (such as fixed columns) and bug fixes.

Support is handled by a community forum or you can purchase "professional level" support. In my limited experience so far, the support provided by the community forum has been excellent and is well staffed by the Xceed development team. Every question I have asked was quickly answered with accurate and detailed information.

I think the idea of offering this control for free with community support is an excellent move. It provides the development community with a much needed data grid control, it helps solidify Xceeds place in the WPF controls market space, and it results in a control that well understood, well supported, and provides the features needed by the community.

Download it now or view the excellent live XPAB demo.