What's are the best readings to start using WPF instead of WinForms?
- by Ivan
Keeping in mind what CannibalSmith once said - "All the answers are saying "WPF is different". That's a huge understatement. You not only have to learn lots of new stuff - you must forget everything you've learned from Forms. It's a completely new way of doing UI."
.. and having many years of experience with visual Windows desktop applications development (VB6, Borland C++ Builder VCL, WinForms) (which is hard to forget), how do I quickly move to developing to say well-formed WPF applications with Visual Studio?
I don't need boozy-woozy graphics to give my app look and feel of a Hollywood blockbuster or a million dollar pyjamas. I always loved tidiness of standard Windows common controls and UI design guidelines, end even more I enjoyed them under Vista Glass Aero Graphite sauce.
I am perfectly satisfied with WinForms but I want to my applications to be built of the most efficient and up-to-date standard technologies and architectured according to the most efficient and flexible patterns of today and tomorrow, leveraging interface-based integration and functionality reuse and to take all advantages of modern hardware and APIs to maximize performance, usability, reliability, maintainability, extensibility, etc.
I very much like the idea of separating view, logic and data, letting a view to take all advantages of the platform (may it run as a web browser applet on a thin client or as a desktop application on a PC with a latest GPU), letting logic be reused, parallelized and seamlessly evolve, storing data in a well structured format in a right place.
But... while moving from VB6 to Borland C++ Builder was very easy (no books/tutorials needed to turn it on and start working) (assuming I already knew C++), moving from BCB to WinForms was the same seamless, it does not seem any obvious to me how to do with WPF.
So how do I best convert myself from a WinForms developer into a right-way thinking and doing WPF developer?
