Saturday, August 1, 2009

WPF Training at Orion

I have seen so many times Jim Mangaly giving nice presentations and trainings, when I was working in Identitymine.As a Software engg I never thought that I have to take WPF sessions.

But the earth didn't stop it's rotations.It became weeks,weeks became months and months became years.After 2 years I joined in Orion Inc and at a fine noon ,I was asked to present a WPF session.

Initially I was in big confusion "How to present the new features in WPF ?" It is very easy to work with.But very difficult to make others understand these new features.I had 1 hour left with me to prepare.It is not enough to prepare even about XAML.But I have to convey what is xaml.My audience is from .Net2.0 so finally I decided to present WPF features by relating the drawbacks of .Net 2.0 windows forms, and coresponding solutions in WPF.See some examples below.
  • Windows forms developer has to get design(in some format like jpg) from designer and implement himself.This eats a good amount developer's precious time and the work is repetition.WPF has a solution which is called XAML to solve this problem.
  • In Windows forms if someone needs to replace a digital clock control by analog clock he has to create a new control and override it's OnPaint method.But WPF provides a mechanism called templating which does this in a shorter time.
  • Rotating a button in Windows forms is a 'Job'.But in WPF its a matter of 3 lines of code which specifies a RotateTransform.
Yes.This did the trick.At least they got some words like "XAML","Template","Transform","Styles" etc... which are going to make their life easier in the WPF world.The feedback was good and I decided to continue giving detailed sessions on WPF.2 sessions are over as of now and hope I can complete the other sessions soon...