Saturday, November 29, 2008 3:07 PM Ahmed

A Must read WPF Resource,Books,Articles and Blogs.

WPF is BIG so be patient and try to question everything you used to do in other technology,that will open the doors to understand WPF Application Design and Production since you need to balance between the User Interface/ UX (User eXperience) and the background pluming because that is what you will be doing the most ,you need to ask your self questions like:

What is the shape of data should I get to the UI to get that user experience?
How should I Design my application parts(Layers) to interact with such decoupled(seperated) technology?
When to get data from the database and when to update back?
Do I need to run this Function on a separate Thread,do I need a New Thread Object or a BackgroundWorker,..Or maybe use the Dispatcher?
What Data Access technology should I use?
What is a INotifyPropertyChanged?
What is an ObservableCollection?
Are User Controls and Custom Controls that important to know about?

There are two parts that a Developer need to know about when developing WPF Application :

The Data Part
UI Part

1. The Data Part:

It is the Logical Design of your application Code Behind

Events
Properties
Change Tracking
Authentication
Entities
Data Objects
DataSets

2. UI Part:

it is the Interface and Interaction Design and Animation

XAML
DataTemplates
ControlTemplate
Styles
DoubleAnimation
Storyboards
Resources
Transformations
Bitmap Effects
Layout Controls

Try to understand that "everything is not what it seems!" don't try thinking the old way you used to do applications ,a good practice is to look for WPF Application -start with small ones- and try to understand how did they do that design or interface what did they use to layout controls. is it a StackPanel,a GridView or maybe a nested design of both.

Here is what I have learned from: