Brian Noyes gave a presentation to the Cleveland .NET SIG last night on WPF for ASP.NET Developers. I took some notes, which I’ll present a few of here in case they’re helpful to anyone else.

• WPF
• • Logical Pixels, not physical pixels, each 1/96 of an inch
  • Vector Graphics based
  • Containers
  • • Many controls are containers
    • Support composition (images within buttons within buttons etc.)
  • Declarative XAML
  • • Documents and Media are 1st class objects
    • • Video/Audio
      • Word DOCs, PDF, etc.
  • Supports Interop (both ways) with Windows Forms in about 4 LOC
  • Requires .NET 2.0
  • • New features will require .NET 3.0/3.5
• Application Types
• • Windows Application
  • • Same as Windows Forms
    • Can support ClickOnce deployment
  • XBAP
  • • XAML Browser Application
    • Runs in the browser transparent to the user
    • Behind scenes, uses ClickOnce to deploy
    • Limited Security Context
  • XAML in the Browser
  • • Static – no script/DLLs
    • Basically a way to render without resorting to HTML
• Silverlight 1.1 – What’s needed?
• • Runtime
  • SDK
  • Orcas B1 and Tools
  • Expression Blend 2
• Silverlight 1.1 – Features
• • .NET Codebehind
  • Some Controls
  • Access to BCL
  • LINQ
  • Networking stack including REST/RSS
  • Dynamic Language Support
  • Some DRM story
• XAML Basics
• • Elements define objects or set properties – similar to ASP.NET markup
  • XML namespaces scope objects defined in markup
  • • Think Imports or using statements
  • Dependency Properties – Attached Property
  • • Objects can refer to properties of their containers
    • e.g. <Image Grid.Column=”1” … />
    • Also used to affect behavior, particularly in WF
  • Note calls to InitializeComponent() at design time, even though this doesn’t exist until runtime.
• Data Binding
• • Example: Text=”{Binding Path=Title}”
  • Window.DataContext is the property to assign collections or objects to
• Blend2
• • Supports Adding Events to Controls if VS is used at same time
  • Switches focus to VS and adds the event
  • Requires VS to compile the app then before Blend can preview it
  • My take – better than hand writing the events but very klugey to have to jump between the tools, especially when MSBuild would be so easy to call from Blend.

Overall it was a good overview. I missed the very beginning. The slides and demos and such are available on Brian’s blog. If that doesn’t work, try the .NET SIG Presentations area.

[categories: XAML,WPF,Silverlight]