Kick Start WPF

Rahul Pulikkot Nath
Rahul Pulikkot Nath

Table of Contents

Every time one of my friends asks,'Hey how to start off with WPF',I think of putting up a post,so that I could easily direct them and say,'Hey check out my post in my blog'.Maybe from the next time I would :)

There are a lot of blogs that describes on how to Kick start WPF,and this is my version of it.

WPF is just like any other technology that you would love to learn,except for the fact that not all technologies are cool..but WPF really is and you would enjoy every bit learning it.

Books would be the best source to kick start the learning,as the topics would be covered in a organized manner,so that you wouldn't need to hunt down the meaning of something new that you would come across.Some suggested books on WPF are

  1. Pro WPF 4.5 in C#: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 4.5 by Mathew MacDonald
  2. WPF 4.5 Unleashed by Adam Nathan
  3. Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (Pro - Developer) by Charles Petzold

There are a lot of other books too that are good,but personally I found this as good for beginners.

Some of the must know things as far as WPF is concerned would be its Layout mechanism(Mathew's book gives a good explanation of that),Binding mechanism(Adams book should be good for that ).Also do understand the concept of Resources,Styles and Templates  if you would be playing the role of UX developer :).Otherwise also those are good to know concepts.

As with any technology developing a 'Hello World' kind of application is easy.Its in about understanding the best practices,patterns that are best supported and implementing things the way they were actually meant to be.Same holds true for WPF too :)MVVM is one such pattern thats most talked about in WPF.There is a very good article by Josh Smith.There is also a book by him,Advanced MVVM,if you are interested in detail.Also do check out Prism that is by the Microsoft P&P team.It provides a very good guidance on how to go about developing applications.

You would also find lots of videos in channel9,which should also be a good source of information.

Blogs are another source of information,and lots of people seems to be in love with WPF,including me :)Almost all the major contributors to WPF are part of WPF disciples,from which you can easily navigate to their respective blogs.

For anything else there is always the MSDN forum,with people all round the world ready to answer your questions.Feel free to post any specific doubts that you come across.

Finally all reading and no implementing makes little use.So get a Visual Studio up and running and try things side by side..and soon you would find yourself good in WPF :)

Welcome to WPF :)

WPF