Teach myself WinForms and WPF...

In the next two weeks, I will be spending some time to learn WinForms and WPF to expand my .NET knowledge. :) I was a UI dev in Outlook,, so I understand the basic concepts of GDI and Win32 programming. But I haven't used WinForms much at all. WinForms is based on Win32! So this will be interesting. Seeing different parts of .NET for the first time always gives you new perspective.

Before I begin, do you have any advice? What was the most difficult thing for you when you learn WinForms or WPF?

I plan on blogging my experience regularly, and share my insights to everyone!

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2006
  The one thing I find difficult with WinForms is how I structure the application - meaning am I using the MVC model or am I coding it adhoc. MFC for instance provides some amount of structure for your application but with Winforms you are free to choose however you want to do it. Most books demonstrate very small samples, but don't tell how to tackle a big say Financial Winforms application.
• Anonymous
  September 29, 2006
  One mistake I've seen people make is to put a lot code in the event handlers.  That works for simple SDI apps but becomes a mess in large apps.  Try to create a class or classes that represent the "brains" of the application and have the event handlers call these classes to get work done.
  
  Multi-threaded applications can be a big learning curve.  You need to always be thinking about all the things that are happening at the same time.  Remember that almost any call on a control derived class must be done from the UI thread.
• Anonymous
  October 17, 2006
  So a few posts ago, I said I'll teach myself WinForms. It's been about a month since then... and I want