The Coding Humanist

As promised several weeks ago, I now have a short review up on Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation book.

Two other books I've spent some time in but won't review are Return of the King by Tolkein and For One More Day by Mitch Albom. The former was fantastic. I think I like Two Towers better, but the whole trilogy was great. As for the latter, it took me about four chapters to get bored. Oh well. They're not all interesting.

Recently Expression Blend went into RC mode (Blend, if you don't already know, is MS's next WPF designer). Since I've been out of touch for the last few weeks, I am not sure how long it has been out.

The new Blend is now installed on my machine. First impression? It is considerably more responsive. Now last weekend I added an extra gig of ram to my machine (from 1 to 2 gigs), so that may have something to do with it, but I don't think so. I often used it when I had extra RAM left over, so I don't think the increase in RAM did it. But I could be wrong. But if I'm not, they have at least made some improvements in the performance. Bravo.

A very useful property for visual elements that you wanted to use in a designer in Visual Studio in Winform development was the DesignMode property of Component. That allowed you to make conditional code that wouldn't have the proper context to run in a design mode environment.

It is not immediately obvious how to do that in WPF, because it doesn't show up in the intellisense where you would expect it. But, it is still there. It is a little less convenient, but no worries. A check would look something like this:

bool foo = System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(this);

That boolean value would indicate whether or not you were in design mode. A lot more verbose, but still workable. 

theWPFblog had some good things to say about a book that I just finished reading. I pretty much concur. I'll have my own review on it up soon.

So I finally started looking into WPF. I finally had a project that could use it. I've spent the last week and three days spending just about all my spare time reading and coding this stuff.

First impression...wow. Over the last few months I have been spending time in ASP.NET Ajax and have been very impressed, and I still am. But this...this just blows me out of the water. Seriously, as I do things, I keep saying "wow" to myself. I also found myself frequently bugging my personal winforms gui guru David just to say "wow" to him.

It is going to have quite the learning curve with most who have experience in winform development. That has been the case for me. It's not that it is very hard; it is just very different.

More thoughts later, for sure. The project that involves WPF will go on for quite some time. I will be able to tell you more about the specific project sometime in March, I expect. Stay tuned.

Until then, if you do any windows development, check it out. It rocks. And while you are at it, check out Expression Blend. Very useful.