How to begin WPF development?

Question

I\'ve been using Winforms since .NET 1.1 and I want to start learning WPF.

I\'m looking for some good resources for a beginner in WPF. What should I read, what tools

Answer 1

The learning curve is high, but there are a lot of really good resources out there. And, the MSDN documentation and SDK samples (as some have already mentioned) are really good.

One thing that will help you though, is just to acknowledge the learning curve up front, and to not get discouraged when it doesn't make sense. There really are a lot of concepts to 'grok' before you can do some even basic things.

The WPF books already mentioned are all valuable in their own way. My personal experience was that I got a copy of WPF Unleashed first and tried reading it to no avail. It wasn't until I picked up Charles Petzold's Application = Code + Markup and read through some of that ... before I could even begin to understand WPF Unleashed. However, my brain needs detail before concepts actually sink in ...

Tim Sneath has an excellent list of WPF bloggers that I have found valuable to get hooked into the WPF community: WPF Bloggers

A few blogs on my must read list:

• Rob Relyea
• Dr. WPF
• Josh Smith
• Robby Ingebretsen
• Kevin Moore
• Charles Petzold
• Pavan Podila

Another thing I would do is get Dr. WPF's snippet library (located here). This is an extremely good way to learn some of the basic plumbing type concepts like Dependency Properties, Routed Events, and Routed Commands.

Finally, I would get a copy of Blend (v2.5 is still in beta and free) and use that to generate xaml and then dive into that generated xaml to understand what you did in Blend, maps to the WPF API.

Hope this helps. Good luck.