The $3,000 WPF brain injection

I just came back from the DevelopMentor WPF Essentials training. It was ultra effective. It changed the way how I thought about GUIs and Microsoft. I thought XAML was a configuration file for DirectX, but now I know better. XAML is a very powerful declarative programming language and the key to successful GUI development with WPF and Silverlight.

This blog post provides helpful links for getting started with WPF and XAML

The book of WPF books

The good news is that you only need to buy one book. This one is in full color and exceptionally well written and organized. The DevelopMentor course material is based on this book.

Figure 1: The #1 WPF book

The tool box

Development environment

The following two tools get you 99.9 %  to XAML land. You can share your projects between these tools.

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio comes in different flavors. The Express Edition is free for everyone. The Professional Edition is free for Students at http://dreamspark.com.

Expression Blend 4 is free for students at http://dreamspark.com and comes with the Windows Phone 7 tools, which are for free.

XAML experimenters

If you don’t have the heavy hitters on your computer, but would like to experiment with XAML you can use the following tools

KAZAML try the beta. Best light weight XAML editor in my opinion.

XAMLPadX is ok, but not my favorite.

XAMLPad2009 from the WPF 4 Unleashed book source.

Vector graphic drawing software

Adobe Illustrator is the tool of the pros. It can export drawings as XAML.

Bitmap to XAML vectorizer

If you need a bitmap converted into a vector graphic and export it as XAML, then Inkscape might the tool for you. This blog post describes how to use it.

Reverse engineering

Reflector with BAMLViewer Add-In

Paint programs

Adobe Photoshop

Paint.NET is free but not for you, if you breath Photoshop. And the website is a complete disaster, if you have thousands of download links, but only one doesn’t point to the products of the advertisers.

Sample code

WPF 4 Unleashed sample code

from http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780672331190

Facebook App

Fishbowl is an open source Facebook client hosted on CodePlex: http://fishbowl.codeplex.com/

Essential samples

Demo code created during the WPF Essentials class: wpf.zip

Tutorials

Josh Smith’s Guided Tour

Videos

DNRTV provides great introductory tutorials in general and for WPF in particular: http://www.dnrtv.com/ 

Expression Blend Training from Microsoft