Kinda Easy, Kinda Hard: A WinForms programmer looks at WPF
WinForms is your comfortable pair of old sneakers. You've been programming with them since 1.0. You've adjusted to them nicely.
Now along comes this new pair of racing shoes: WPF. Everyone tells you these shoes will make you run faster. They're flashy, certainly. But they're new, and different. Will they pinch? Maybe you should just stick to what you know.
That's how I saw WPF at first: the demos were cool, but I didn't see that much that I couldn't do with WinForms.
But Silverlight and other tools show that WPF is the future of .NET. Like it or not, my old sneakers are wearing out. It's time to upgrade. So I dove in and built my first WPF application. This talk will show lessons I learned along the way, with an emphasis on two things:
* Kinda Easy: Things that were surprisingly easy to do with WPF.
* Kinda Hard: Things that frustrated and annoyed me, and seem easier with WinForms.
Martin L. Shoemaker is a software developer with 19 years experience in the industry. He has worked in the fields of color science, on-line shopping, databases, material handling, medical imaging, customer relations management, and inventory projection. In February 2004, Microsoft named him as an MVP for C#.
Martin is also a frequent speaker, having presented to Software Development (West, East, and Best Practices), Visual Studio Live, Visual C++ Developers Conference, UML World, Rational Users Conference, Web Services Edge, the Ann Arbor Computer Society, the Ann Arbor IT Zone, the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group, the West Michigan .NET User Group, and the Detroit Colour Council. As a speaker for the International .NET Association (INETA), he has presented to the Omaha .NET User Group, the Oklahoma .NET Users Group, the Tulsa .NET User Group, and the Chicago .NET Users Group. His most popular presentations are Richard Hale Shaw's UML BootCamp, which he wrote and presents. He has presented this course both in public settings and for individual clients including: Microsoft, Intermec, Siemens Dematic, University of Michigan, Target, LaBatts, NISC, and Silicon Energy. Martin is available both as an instructor and as a consultant and mentor, offering his guidance and expertise to clients who need high-quality design services with UML, as well as custom software in the Windows and .NET environments. He also develops Tablet PC applications. His latest development project is Tablet UML, a low cost UML tool for the Tablet PC.
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