A Half-Day with Microsoft WPF and a Rainbow

As the bus travelled over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we trundled through a rainbow to the pot-of-gold called Sydney Financial District: The CBD. Still looking for the leprechauns.

Microsoft WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), a key part of Microsoft .Net 3.0 presents a mechanism for building interfaces in XAML, and code against this in a CLR language. In Joseph’s and Deepak’s course, we had a choice of language. Having never used C# before, I decided to deep end myself with C#. So much like Java; takes me back to 1998.

Thanks to Joseph and Deepak for their time. Positioning WPF, or in normal-speak: what problem does WPF solve need to be clearly articulated. Especially when you compare Win32 Forms vs. Managed vs. WPF vs. XHTML via ASP.NET – WPF has yet to hit its sweet spot. The separation of Design to Development is interesting; writing the specs/contracts to get the wiring correct is going to be critical.
There was some homework, and I have a project in mind for Uncle Mike built with WPF. However, Mike is a renegade Mac user. Oops, no Firefox or Mac until WPF/E comes around. Might have to go Flex.

The rich user experiences, connected to the internet are starting to appear in all sorts of places.

How do you build them? How complex is the developer experience: setup, debugging, maintenance and deployment?

Time to start that “Do Something“. Maybe that’s what the rainbow was telling me.