For the last two weeks Anne Marsan has led study group. Both of her sessions were about WPF and she led them by writing up instructions on how to produce a project that illustrated what she wanted to teach.
Her first sessions was an introduction to WPF. We wrote a form in XAML and played with a few different controls. The end result was a little application that could draw circles on a canvas and clear the canvas. Part of the fun of our study group is that everyone is learning the whole time, even the leader. We found that the circles were being drawn over other controls because of the ordering of the controls in the XAML, but if we set “ClipToBounds” to true on the canvas it would not draw over other controls.
Yesterday’s session was mostly centered around data binding, but she also went over a little bit of layout. Data binding is made a lot easier in WPF, and you can do it in the XAML or in code. Also, there is a variety of things you can bind to controls; you can bind to a particular properties of an object or to an XPath on an XML document.
WPF has a lot of new ways to layout an application, and I think this is a bit of a double-edged sword. It has a high bar for entry, because trying to figure out how to build your UI can be pretty daunting. However, once you get over the steep learning curve, there are a lot more options at your disposal to create exactly what you want.
This is the last study group of the year, and we’ll be reconvening in February. I’m really looking forward to it!
