This screencast was captured at MSDN Live in Trondheim 11. September 2008.

Download the source code from the presentation.

Download the slides from the presentation.

Last week I held a presentation about WPF for Microsoft Student Community at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).

As I’ve mention before in my blog; Microsoft Student Community is an organization for students with interest in Microsoft related technologies and especially .NET. The organization is driven students on voluntarily basis. 44 people had registered for the event and I think and 30 of them came. The content of the event was WPF and LINQ which my friend Jonas Follesø held. If you continue to read you will find Q&As from the session. And If you fingers are itching to touch XAML and WPF you can download the source code I posted in the "NNUG WPF presentation" post.

In my presentation I focused on XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) and some basic WPF; standard controls, triggers, data binding style and templates. During my speech I got a lot of questions. The students particularly seemed to care about XAML. No doubt they saw the trade off by developing the user interface in a markup language.

Someone also asked about the deployments scenarios. Here is the full overview of the scenarios. Scenario 1; compile a WPF application as a standard EXE. Then the application will be run as a process on the OS with security context from the user that started the application.

Scenario 2; compile a WPF application as XBAP (eXtensible Binary Application Protocol). These applications can run inside a web browser but they will run in sandbox mode. This means that you will get limited access to different APIs. For instance you will not get access to the hard drive. Both of these scenarios require .NET 3.0/3.5 installed.

Scenario 3; use Silverlight. Silverlight is a browser plugin and it’s almost cross platform. It works on IE, Safari (yes on Mac OS X) and Firefox. The Open Source community (Mono project) is also working with porting this technology to the Linux platform. You can read more about it on the Mono-Project site. What I almost forgot to mention is that Silverlight contains a subset of the WPF API. It's like .NET microframework for .NET.

If you attended the session and have any question please post me a comment or send me an e-mail.

 

I held a presentation at NNUG 25th October in Trondheim. The content of the presentation was XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). The goal was to give the audience a basic knowledge about the fundamentals of these two technologies. I thought that this might give them a head start on learning more about these technologies. I must admit that the learning curve has been quite steep for me. Maybe I’m just a slow learner.

As I have gotten more hands-on experience with these technologies, my knowledge about them has grown. But there were a few fundamental principles I had overseen during the last couple of months and which are crucial to gain XAML/WPF eureka. So I’ve created a reading list for you XAML/WPF newcomers. I hope you find it useful.  I've also posted a link to the source code from the presentation in the end of this post.

XAML

XAML is based on XML and stands for (eXtensible Markup Languageee). It’s a declarative programming language designed for instantiate and initialize .NET objects. Yes, that’s right – a programming language designed for creating instances of .NET objects and set initial values by using XML syntax.

• Learn what XAML is
• Learn the syntax of XAML
• Understand how it works by instantiate and initialize your custom classes
• Use Markup Extension to extend the XAML language
• Others
  • Terminology
• My XAML bookmarks at del.icio.us

WPF

• Introduction to WPF
• Learn and understand the architecture and the important structures of it
  • WPF Architecture
  • Element Tree
• Properties
  • Dependency Properties
    • Dependency Properties explained
    • The Ins and Outs of Dependency Properties
  • Attached Properties
• Events
  • Routed Events Explained
  • Triggers
  • Triggers 2
• Data Binding
  • Beatrice Costa on Data Binding
  • Code Project Article
  • Data Binding with objects
• Resources
• Styling and Templating
  • Styles and Triggers
• My WPF bookmarks at del.icio.us

Yesterday we kicked of Microsoft Student Community at NTNU in Trondheim for this school year. We got 100 registered participants, 80 of these came to the event. It could have been more, but we had to close the registration today because of the size limitation of the room and the size of the pizza order.

The meaning of the event was to enlighten and motivate new students to be a part of Microsoft Student Community. Microsoft Student Community NTNU is an organization for students with interest in Microsoft related technologies, especially .NET. It’s driven by students, and has no commercial influence by Microsoft. It’s a place where students can come together to learn new cool stuff. So if you want to stand out from the crowd and be little different form all the other students, this is the place to be. My experience is that students with experience in Microsoft and .NET related technologies, will certainly get positive responses from potentially employers.

The theme for the kick-off was a bit vivid, but it certainly caught the eye of the students since 80 students did care to participate. We branded the event with lots of posters saying “Do you want a job?”. I think we hit bullseye, because it’s not a secret that students/employees with background in .NET related technologies are very hot in the job market today.

Hans Olav started the event by telling who we are (Microsoft Student Community) and what can we do for you. He also said something about Imagine Cup, and he talked about our experience within this contest. We also had some technology sneak peak previews on WPF, LINQ and XNA for the students and what they have coming if they continue to participating in Microsoft Student Community events this year.

I gave the presentation on WPF where most of it really was a demo. In the demo I did create and photo viewer application that read photos from disk. The demo contained of 3 lines of C# and the rest was XAML. I used the HTML/CSS analogy for the XAML and XAML template feature, since many of the students as I expected had has some experience with web/HTML development.

Resources

I promised some of the students that I would post links to WPF resources on my blog. Here you go:

• http://wpf.netfx3.com/
  Microsoft’s Community website for WPF
• WPF Forum @ MSDN
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/
  Tim Sneath is a notorious blogger and a Client Platform Technical Evangelist
• http://www.beacosta.com/blog/
  Beatrice Costa has many good posts on WPF Data Binding
• http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/default.aspx
• http://www.ericsink.com/wpf3d/index.html
  Eric Sink has written some good articles about 3D in WPF
• http://www.thewpfblog.com/
• http://www.windowsclient.net
  Another WPF Community Site from Microsoft
• http://wpf-resources.com/
  Lots of WPF resources
• http://del.icio.us/goeran.hansen/wpf
  My WPF bookmarks at delicious

Here are the tools you need to get started with WPF development:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• Microsoft Expression Blend

Here is my source code from the presentation. Feel free to drop me a comment or send me an e-mail if you have any question concerning the source code or Microsoft Student Community.

Happy hacking and coding!