Windows Presentation Foundation...arghhh, it rocks!

  • Article

I’m cruising along with Windows Presentation Foundation (I’m calling it win-pee-ef, and no, it’s not in Wikipedia…yet!!) ahead of my demo this Thursday (here is the rego link BTW), and I’m realising, this stuff rocks!

Not only is the development experience very agreeable (I’m using the XAML designer at the moment, but I know we are releasing a bunch of designers for VS2005 before the whole bundle drops), but I’m only now seeing the coolness behind this whole “declarative” model (I sit next to Nigel Watson, our Architect gzus, and he is very patient with my “wows” and “awesomes” as I discover this stuff).

For example, when I declare in XAML, a Grid element, and set the LayoutTransform attribute to “scale 3.0”; WinPF actually maps that to the Grid class’s LayoutTransform member, and sets that member to a new instance of a ScaleTransform class with the x and y directions to 3.0!! All from my just writing:

Too cool for school! Also, I didn’t realise, but if you type:

prop

Into VS2005, then hit tab twice, it expands it into a property template:

Which you can then modify to your taste. I like very much this VS2005 and WinPF.