Windows Presentation Foundation – Line of Business Hands-On-Lab Material

Last December we held a hands-on lab on how to create a line of business application from scratch on Windows Presentation Foundation using Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.

Windows Presentation Foundation together with the new WPF control toolkit offers a whole new set of controls to build state of the art business desktop applications where classically Windows Forms would have been used.

In the lab you will learn how to use WPF and the new WPF Control Toolkit to create such an end-to-end, data bound line of business application. You will leverage the Entity Framework to connect to the database, implement the new Data Grid to visualize data and the brand new Ribbon control and control styling to create a state a of the art user experience. Finally you will make your application capable of printing.

The application itself is an order management system based on the Northwind sample database from Microsoft. The final user interface will look like this:

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The manual consist of 73 printed pages and takes around 4 hours to complete. The ZIP file available for download contains the required database and the project in various stages of completion.

The lab was built using the October 2008 CTP of the WPF control toolkit.

The entire hands-on lab is written in English.

 

Lab download:

https://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/de/presentationfinder/detail.mspx?id=106160

 

Lab prerequisites:

Visual Studio 2008 Professional

· Trial download: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/aa700831.aspx

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express

· Trial download: https://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/download/

Note: The basic version, “SQL Server 2008 Express” is sufficient for this project but optionally installing “SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools” gives you a SQL Server Management Studio that comes in very handy when configuring SQL Server for your own projects.

Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

· Download: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/cc533448.aspx

Expression Blend 2

· Trial download: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5FF08106-B9F4-43CD-ABAD-4CC9D9C208D7&displaylang=en

Expression Blend 2 SP 1

· Download: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EB9B5C48-BA2B-4C39-A1C3-135C60BBBE66&displaylang=en

WPF Toolkit Binaries

· Download, extract and install the “WPF Toolkit Binaries”. The installer will place the DLLs in the “C:\Program Files\WPF Toolkit” folder. They contain the WPF DataGrid and DatePicker controls that we will be using in our project.

· Download: https://www.codeplex.com/wpf/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15598

Note: Adding the WPF ribbon is a last, optional step in this hands-on lab, as everyone who wants the bits needs to sign an online Office UI license, they cannot be provided together with this hands-on lab CD-Rom but must be downloaded separately.

· You can download a preview version of the WPF Ribbon from the Office UI Licensing Site: https://www.codeplex.com/wpf/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WPF%20Ribbon%20Preview