Learning WPF… For real this time.

I’ve been diving into WPF, again.

WPF is different now and will be even more different in 4.0. The WPF Toolkit is not an “option” in 3.5, it is a requirement. Just like I wouldn’t want to write .NET Code without certain 3rd party libraries (castle, elevate, etc..), I would not want to write WPF without the toolkit.

WPF in .NET 4.0 includes many things from the WPF Toolkit. The one thing that makes Winforms developers like me feel right at home is DataGrid, but the WPF DataGrid is not DataGridView for WPF. I keep running into surprises.

The latest surprise had to do with a prototype I was building. In Winforms, I often just databind a DataGridView to any IList<T>, and let magic do the rest for me. After all, it is just a prototype.

I tried to do the same thing with WPF DataGrid and I was met with a surprise. Surprise! Don’t do that. As soon as I changed from a IList<T> to an ObservableCollection<T> the binding worked. AutoGenerateColumns=”True” makes it very easy to prototype.

1 thought on “Learning WPF… For real this time.”

  1. I thought about learning WPF.

    But based on what’s coming in Silverlight 4, and the ability to run it outside the browser, I think that’s the one to learn.

    My gut tells me it’s got more legs under it than WPF.

    Just my $0.02. 🙂

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