Getting Started with WPF (Visual Studio "Orcas")

I always say that a developer cannot know everything and be fully updated with technology. In my opinion a developer should choose several technologies / tools / areas and develop an expertise in them, instead of knowing everything not deeply.

When WinFX (later to become .Net Framework 3.0) came along I had chosen to be an expert in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and let someone else pick up Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Recently I have joined a new project that looks into WPF to see whether the presentation layer should be developed with it. As a member of the Architecture Team of the project, and as the Technology Lead of it, I finally have a good reason to start playing with WPF. So, expect more posts on this later.

Regarding Visual Studio "Orcas" - I started working with the VPC version, but a week ago downloaded the self-extracting version and now working side by side with Visual Studio 2005.

As Tim Sneath (Client Platform Technical Evangelist) says:

"Orcas" has a ton of new features for WPF development over the releases that we shipped as extensions for Visual Studio 2005. It's got true WYSIWYG support for XAML code edits, it's got the new Property Editor checked in (shared with Expression Blend), it has far better Intellisense support for XAML, and it's much better for layout.

Since Orcas has a better Cider (WPF Designer for Visual Studio) version in it, I chose to learn WPF straight in Orcas, and skip Visual Studio 2005 at all.

I found an important post in the WPF Designer ("Cider") MSDN Forum about the features included in [Beta1] and the features that don't.

Stay tuned for more posts about WPF as I document my findings...

Enjoy!