I've decided that I really need to try and get up-to-speed on WPF, XAML, and all that acronym jazz. I keep getting the nagging feeling that WPF is "not read for prime time", but this may be because I just don't know enough about it.
I'm wondering about people's opinions as to whether I should take the time to learn Expression Studio, or whether I should stick with VS 2008. I've done some work in both, and there are parts of each I like, and parts I don't. I'm not a designer, so much of Expression is a little Greek to me. But VS 2008 support for WPF is a far cry from what you get with WinForms. I realize that it took us several versions of VS to get where we are with WinForms, and some of my issues really do boil down to a lack of tooling/component support. This is another reason why I don't feel that WPF is really "ready". Again, I realize that WPF is still pretty new, but MS seems to be shoving it at people any chance they can get, and I feel that it's not going to be long before they decide that WinForms should go the way of the Edsel.
Anyway, any thoughts from the programmers here would be most appreciated. Do I really need to figure out how to think like a designer and use Blend et al? Or am I making it too hard? Any books/videos/online resources that are helpful? I've spent some time combing through MSDN with little actual value, and a few other MS-related sites have a bunch of "How To" videos which aren't much better than the MSDN documentation. I don't want to become a card-carrying member of the beret-and-latte crowd - I can't afford a Mac ![Smile [:)]](/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)
- but I'd like to be able to make something a little more polished than what I'm getting now.
- Scott
A buddy of mine pointed me to these videos for Expression Blend and WPF:
http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=384
I didn't go through all of them because I've been living in the ASP.Net world and lately Silverlight (and Silverlight of course is just part of WPF) - but I found the videos above pretty well done.
For Silverlight, there are a ton of decent starter videos on silverlight.net/learn.
I found, after writing my first application that was really to showcase the possibilities of Silverlight to our office that it was absolutely essential to use Blend in order to really achieve the bling I was looking for. While everything obviously can be hand-coded in XAML, I am afraid to attempt to understand hardcoding animations/etc in XAML at this point in my XAML development :).
W/ Silverlight, one doesn't have an editable WYSIWYG designer for XAML - I don't know what the case is for WPF, sadly enough. But regardless, I have definitely appreciated having an install of Microsoft Expression Blend.
Chris
These look to be pretty good. Thanks!
- Scott
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