The reason I haven't been blogging much lately is because I'm now heading up a team of developers that are porting a big Winform application to WPF. It's been a blast until now, but I've been too busy to blog. We're using CAB as a means to decouple logic from presentation (MVC-pattern) and one of my developers has been blogging quite heavily about it here.

Let me go into some more detail on the whole WPF experience. As I said, we are porting the client-side of a big application (about 250 screens). We're doing it as an XBAP (Xaml browser application) to enable us to easily distribute it in our intranet. Although this does force us to install a certificate (to gain full-trust), we're not seeing major drawbacks to this approach.
WPF already decouples presentation from code a great deal more then winforms do, but combining it with MVC does give it a whole new dimension. Setting up a simple screen does mean creating a few more classes then we're used to, so we're looking into using the Guidance Automation Tools (GAT) to speed-up development time.

In my honest opinion, WPF is a truly great technology. It does what it promises, but there are a few drawbacks. First of all, I do feel it's kind of slow. Resizing a screen with a lot going on, definitely feels 'heavy'. So that's a bummer (stay away from drop-shadows, they will kill your performance). Furthermore, we are starting to see some places where XAML is not cutting it. For instance, triggers lack power on the equation and multi-bindings are always &&-nd together. Also, some 'bugs', like always clearing validation-errors after a binding update-to-target.
These are all minor things and we can work-around them. It does mean a very steep learning curve for my new developers.

It was a great feeling, when I saw my designteam checking-in controlstyles and my developers not being hindered at all by their work. All the pieces fell into place and that was quite unlike my previous experiences with winforms.

I originally posted this little titbit in the wcf forums, but since lots of people there did not seem to know about it, I'll post it here again:
The framework 3.0 RC1 install will kill your existing .svc mapping, so you will not be able to communicate with IIS hosted WCF services (.svc). Obvious workaround is to add the mapping again manually. This will be fixed in the next RC.

I hope that helps a few people out there!

Just last Friday, I readied everything to integrate my winfx parts into our main application. I instructed the team on what to do and put the bits on our server.

Now, Microsoft released RC1. Just my luck, but I'm obviously very happy that winfx is progressing!! Get the new SDK as well. And, you're not hip if you're not running Powershell RC1, or use the word 'hip'

This blog certainly is not intended to be a reposting platform for yours truly, but I can't not mention a new tool (source code included) that allows you to inspect the visual tree of any Avalon application and even let's you see events and databinding!

It should prove to be an incredible help while debugging/learning/profiling your WPF applications. Get snoop here, and never look back again