January 28 2008
Last week, we held a WPF boot camp for a set of folks here in Redmond. It was a great event and, most pertinently, we taped the entire thing, just as we did last year. (We should have the videos posted in the next few weeks.) And, just as last year, we have had some great sessions on real world WPF by non-Microsoft folks. This year, we had Josh Smith (Infragistics), Alan Le (Vertigo) and Josh Wagoner (IdentityMine). Each gave great talks full of nuggets of WPF wisdom.
Josh's talk really explicated how the model-view-controller pattern is baked into WPF and he provided a very cool skeleton app that demonstrated this, using WPF features like commands, databinding and more, all ready made for unit testing. He actually turned the content of his talk into a code project article. Here's the code and slides from his talk.
Alan Le, self described as a creative developer (nice!), delved into the realities of designer-developer collaboration. Here's his slides.
Josh Wagoner, whose been working on WPF forever I think, covered IRTs (Intermediate Render Targets), animation (both frame based and timer-based) and attached properties (every WPF guru's favorite trick). Check out his demo code and slides.
Overall, listening to these guys talk about their excitement for WPF reminded me how addictive WPF is once you've gained some proficiency. It really appeals to those developers who appreciate elegance.
