Windows Form Vs WPF and XAML

[johnpapa]

I am new to vb.net and have been trying out the Windows Form and the WPF.

With the WPF, MS is enabling the developer to separate the Design of a form, from the Programming behind the form. The Design can be done manually or in Blend and the end result is XAML.

I have two questions for the time being:
1) Can a developer perform ALL the Design in VB, without bothering with XAML?
2) What are the advantages of using XAML instead of VB?

Thanks,
John

[Evil_Giraffe]

1) Theoretically this would be possible, yes, but it would be incredibly hard to do, and give you zero benefit whilst making your code harder to write. Pretend the answer is "No".
2) The main benefit in my eyes is the separation of presentation (XAML) from the application logic (VB code). Being able to deal with these two areas separately and letting WPF's databinding system do the menial work of keeping changes in sync is a very big win. Another good thing is its declarative style (as opposed to the imperative style you would normally end up with in VB code), which can save a ton of time.
XAML can be a bit verbose with all its tags, but VS has pretty good tools for working with it, so you don't need to type it all by hand. As well, there is Blend that you mention, so you're aware of that.

Note that you can get the separation of presentation and logic with WinForms, but it doesn't push you down that route, and it is very easy to mix up logic and presentation concerns in the code-behind of a form. There are libraries and frameworks that can sit on top of WinForms to help guide you away from that, or you can just write your code in a MV* architecture (usually MVP is the easiest, although MVC is doable. Even MVVM is doable - I once wrote a library to help do MVVM in WinForms as part of a long term transition to WPF at a previous company).

[johnpapa]

Thanks for the reply. In other words embrace WPF and XAML.

I downloaded Blend yesterday, but it looked a bit hostile!

Can you suggest some very simple tutorials that would show WPF & XAML in action?

Thanks,
John

[szlamany]

I am four months into my first WPF UI - and I gotta say - it's great!

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Introd...xperiment.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/...de-Part-1-of-n

This is a good read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...ion_Foundation

This is s a cool demo of a calculator

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.90).aspx

[johnpapa]

I am four months into my first WPF UI - and I gotta say - it's great!

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Introd...xperiment.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/...de-Part-1-of-n

This is a good read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...ion_Foundation

This is s a cool demo of a calculator

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.90).aspx

Thanks a lot.

I am four days into mine.

I skimmed over the articles you sent over. They seem exactly what I am looking for.

John

[chris128]

Yeah WPF is the way to go moving forward, but it does have quite a steep learning curve initially (especially for people coming from WinForms). My one bit of advice for people new to WPF would be don't bother dragging and dropping controls onto your form/window in the designer - just learn to write the XAML by hand. It gives you so much more control over layout and how things resize or move around when the window is resized. Oh and also if you get annoyed with the text being a bit blurry in WPF apps like I did, you can use this style to make all TextBlocks use the new rendering mode in .NET 4.0 that makes it much sharper:

<Window x:Class="MainWindow"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525" UseLayoutRounding="True" SnapsToDevicePixels="True">
   
    <Window.Resources>
        <Style TargetType="TextBlock" >
            <Setter Property="TextOptions.TextFormattingMode" Value="Display" />
        </Style>
    </Window.Resources>
    
    <Grid>
    .....

[johnpapa]

Chris thanks for your advice which I will follow.

Being new to VS I can opt for WPF, since I do not have any attachments.
John

[szlamany]

Are you using VS 2012?

It appears to be written in WPF - as does IE10 - although I am guessing...

[MattP]

I would check out the Microsoft Design Toolbox. It's Silverlight oriented but you'll get a good look at XAML and good design principles if you go through the whole thing.

[chris128]

Are you using VS 2012?

It appears to be written in WPF - as does IE10 - although I am guessing...

VS 2010 was written in WPF - which is why issues such as the blurry text got addressed for .NET 4.0. WPF in .NET 3.5 wasn't great as it was very new - there's a video somewhere where the VS team explain that when they came to use it to make VS 2010 they got the WPF team to fix some of these problems. So presumably VS 2012 and 2013 are made in WPF as well.

IE10 isn't made in WPF as its not even a .NET application

[szlamany]

Well IE10 has a feel that must mean they talk to DirectX the same way - I'm not talking about rendering a DOM-page - I'm talking about how the outside UI of IE10 behaves - like the NEW TAB page with selections. That has a GRID-like feel to the layout.

Or I just see XAML everywhere