I've been creating a Web application with some new ASP.NET components from Intersoft Solutions, and believe me, their power will impress you bigtime. These guys are pushing the Web 2.0 envelope way out there.
The Webgrid component is so functional, it's hard to believe what they've done with CSS, JavaScript, and ASP.NET code. But there's a lot more, including a whole client-side framework for building desktop applications within the browser.
The only thing you'll hate is the excessive and irritating nag screens of the evaluation version. I wish they'd use something more subtle as a trial version reminder.
[Full disclosure: I have no interest in the company, but these guys gave me a personal NFR development copy of their WebUI Studio.NET 2007 R1 suite because I'm an MVP. However, I'm actually working with one of the four licenses purchased by Mighty Oaks where I work as a contractor.]
I’ve finally had a chance to sit down with Adam Nathan’s book, Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed from Sams. Talk about thorough! I had no idea there was so much to WPF and how much different it is from Windows Forms development. Although the use of markup makes it more akin to ASP.NET, I’m finding this a strange new world in many ways and almost overwhelming. Good thing there are books like this to help us get the concepts.
Much of the book deals with WPF’s graphics capabilities, including 2D, 3D, animation, transformations, bitmap effects and much more. I guess this emphasizes the Presentation aspect of WPF. However, when you start getting into Bezier curves, the formulas for reflected colours and attenuation, I’m way out of my depth and desperately searching to hand this part off to a graphic designer.
One thing I generally understand is data binding. However, even that topic gets me into unfamiliar territory because the code, covered in Chapter 9, doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. There’s only a short FAQ on binding to a relational database using the new Binding object and the ObjectDataProvider. I would have hoped for much more detail but maybe binding is just so easy that it doesn’t require a lot of discussion. One thing to point out is the author’s view that the XmlDataProvider could be considered a “killer app” for databinding because it makes parsing and navigating XML so easy. I’ll have to explore that further.
This book is really "hands on" - which can be good or bad depending on your perspective and your needs. In the early days of HTML, people coded by hand and really understood what was happening in the page. Then the sophisticated tools came along to write the code quickly. The same is happening again. Nathan’s XAML examples are good (and enhanced by syntax colouring) but I suspect most of us will eventually use designers to create the markup and end up doing very little manually coding. Showing how to create the examples using a graphical interface will probably take another book. Still, it sure helps to know what’s going on in the code when you need to tweak it because the designer doesn’t support what you want to accomplish.
Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed is nicely presented with colour graphics, interesting sidebars, and many tips and warnings that you could only get from an author who was on the inside during WPF’s development.