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Speaking at PDC -- Building an large application with WinFX

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I'm speaking at a lunch session on the 16th about how we built a large client application using WinFX, in particular Windows Presentation Framework (aka Avalon).  The application itself will be announced at PDC, but for the purposes of this talk it doesn't matter what it is, merely how it is built. 

I have just two goals:  to prove that a large client side application can be built using WinFX; and to provide some guidelines and best practices for how one would build such an application. 

The first part is easy.  I will briefly demo the application we have built, showing that it is richly functional in both deep and broad senses.  Then I will back up the demo with statistics on the application, showing that it is all managed code, and what technologies it depends on. 

The second part is the bulk of the talk.  To begin with I will discuss the Model/View/ViewModel design pattern we have applied to developing WinFX UI using "Avalon", in particular data-binding.  The rest of the topics are deeply practical things my team has learned from a couple years of WinFX development.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2005
    John,

    I've engaged in a bit of a discussion with Mano as well as a number of people inside my company regarding Sparkle's promise to allow designers and developers to co-edit a software project.

    In short, I'm skeptical. While I have no doubts that it worked well for you guys, I would be predisposed to think that's because, well, it's you guys. In other words, Mano is probably not only a top designer but a highly technical one as well. In my experience working with designers, they often "think artistically" but don't get concepts like abstraction, factoring, model/view separation, etc.

    Additionally, the tools, language, and workflow really have to support you. Remember the promise of ASP.NET? Designers could make pretty web pages, and coders could just hit the codebehind pages. In practice that rarely works, I suspect due to a host of factors.

    Not trying to harsh your buzz here, I think the stuff is way cool - but I'm eager to get on a project with an actual honest-to-goodness, lives-in-Brooklyn-loft, pierced-nose, black-clothes-wearing graphics/animation person and have it all work out.

    Thoughts?