April 6th, 2010

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 7 : Wrap up

This is the final part in the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series.

Reflections on the Series

One of the aims of this series was to give a deeper look into collaboration the Visual Studio and WPF teams undertook during this release, specifically focusing on the “Lessons learned.” As such, I tended to focus on the issues we encountered and the solutions we came up with, rather than listing all the things that “just worked”. That may have left a negative impression with some readers, but the reality is that we were able to do things with WPF that would have been impractical with GDI and Win32. By impractical, I mean that it would have been possible, but would have taken so much time that we wouldn’t have been able to finish.

The move to WPF also gave us an opportunity to examine the architecture of Visual Studio and make changes that enforce a healthy separation between data and presentation. This is invisible to an end-user but, by reducing maintenance costs and improving ‘testability’ of components, it is immensely valuable to the development team and that investment will pay off in future versions too.

Visual Studio 2010’s use of WPF has enabled a number of interesting extensions, some of which have been mentioned on this blog and I’m sure there will be more to come.

In the end, I hope that this series was helpful and educational and helps ease any concerns about migrating to WPF.  As always, please feel free to use the comment stream to post questions, comments or suggestions.

Links

I’ll take a break from writing my own prose and let others do the talking. There are many, many online resources for WPF and I’m sure some of you have your own favorites. Here are mine.

If you’re looking for new features in version 4.0 here are a few nice summary articles:

Scott Guthrie’s blog : http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/26/wpf-4-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx

Lester Lobo’s blog : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/llobo/

You can also see video walkthroughs here and shorter ones here.

For general WPF training, there are some bite-sized, single-topic screencasts up on windowsclient.net, the official Microsoft site for WPF.

For more in-depth discussions and interviews with team members and enthusiasts, check out Channel 9’s WPF video library.

If you want to get started writing your own WPF extensions to Visual Studio 2010, check out these MSDN videos, samples and the Visual Studio Etensibility learning center. The Visual Studio 2010 SDK contains project templates for creating WPF Tool Windows and extending the new Editor in WPF.

Thanks

I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on earlier posts. Those comments helped shape this series and have inspired additional topics for inclusion in future Visual Studio articles.

Finally, let me thank those on the Visual Studio and WPF teams who helped put together this series, especially Matt Johnson and Phil Price for their excellent articles.

Previous posts in the series:

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Paul Harrington – Principal Developer, Visual Studio Platform Team Biography: Paul has worked on every version of Visual Studio .Net to date. Prior to joining the Visual Studio team in 2000, Paul spent six years working on mapping and trip planning software for what is today known as Bing Maps. For Visual Studio 2010, Paul designed and helped write the code that enabled the Visual Studio Shell team to move from a native, Windows 32-based implementation to a modern, fully managed presentation layer based on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Paul holds a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge, England and lives with his wife and two cats in Seattle, Washington.

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Visual Studio has been around since 1997 when it first released many of its programming tools in a bundle. Back then it came in 2 editions - Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise. Since then the family has expanded to include many more products, tools, and services.

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