Over the last six months, I’ve been working with a team of good folks building a pretty serious set of WCF based web services. These services were intended to be the next generation of products that will hopefully reinvent the systems that support a large percentage of our business. It’s been a fun ride and I’ve definitely learned WCF inside and out. Part of this effort involved building out a semi-customer facing client application. We needed a harness to drive development of our service-oriented features as well as something that showcased the platform independence of the services we were building. We’re primarily a traditional Win32 shop with a bunch of C++/MVC and Windows Forms, but WPF was the presentation technology we choose. I was vocally against this choose at the time. I didn’t think it was a wise selection from a learning curve and maturity standpoint. I saw many more risks than rewards. In the end, I think I was right and wrong. WPF has a ridiculously high learning curve and IMO they arbitrarily veered from many of the API and naming conventions/standards which steepened this learning curve unnecessarily. But, in the end… we had a team that was strong enough to do what we needed to do and we were able to overcome the learning curve. Luckily we had one teammate that had strong skills in XAML and WPF and he did most of the work. I think we would have been in big trouble if we needed to actually build a real client application with real-world complexity. Knocking out a client application that display data from WCF services was pretty straightforward.
All that was a good toe-dipping exercise into the world of WPF and XAML. I learned enough to not hate XAML, but I certainly have yet to embrace it. In the coming weeks I’m moving on to a new project entirely based on Silverlight and Prism, so it’s time to start taking this stuff seriously. Here and now I’m pledging to open my mind and mentally embrace WPF and XAML. I’ve read WPF Unleashed, but I just didn’t absorb much of it, and that’s been the extent of my exploration.
Here’s what I plan to power through to get serious about this:
I’ll need to find a pet project… my go-to pet project is a Family Tree web site. I think I’ll build a single codebase with a WPF and Silverlight client.