Hi all,
I've been dabbling with various aspects of the new 3.5 technologies and I
can tell there's loads of potential for creating powerful new applications,
but I'm finding it tough to know where and how to start. I've been coding
on .NET since it was in its alpha incarnation way back in 2000, but this
latest version is a bit daunting. There are so many new technologies to
learn and many of them seem to have fairly steep learning curves. Has
anyone else found the same thing?
I want to release new versions of several applications ranging from a simple
desktop end-user app to an n-tier corporate app, and the promises of some of
these new technologies are very tempting. I'd love to use XAML for the
front end, skin the apps, introduce some simple animations to make the GUI
more intuitive etc. One of my n-tier suites would benefit from peer-to-peer
chat so I'm thinking WCF might be good for that. Printing has always been a
point of contention but it seems that WPF documents could change all of
that. I have no idea if WF could be of benefit to any of my apps, because I
simply don't know enough about what it's for!
The problem is, where to start? I've found plenty of "hello world" samples
for XAML and examples illustrating some of its concepts, but the few
tutorials I've found seem a bit lacking. XPS documentation is abysmal, and
I haven't even scratched the surface of WCF --- of course, this ignores
things like WF, CardSpace, SilverLight, XBAP etc etc. I can't even seem to
see many dedicated newsgroups on the MS server for things like WPF, which I
find quite amazing. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place?
At the moment I feel that if I were to just dive in and start coding, I'd
look at my work a few months later and wish I'd done most of it differently,
or would find so many better and easier ways to achieve what I'd just done
that would have cut my production time in half. For instance, when printing
with WPF should I just go right ahead and start coding the document
structure or could I use a tool like Expression to create some sort of
document template visually (and no doubt a lot more easily)?
What I'd love to find is a proper, MS (or MS endorsed) soup-to-nuts
application that covers all or most of the above technologies and uses them
with best practices in mind for a real world scenario, complete with source
code and some decent documentation. Something like "NorthWind for 2008".
Does anyone know of anything that fits the bill?
Thanks,
Alex