How do you learn WPF and Silverlight?

Question

I've been doing some WPF development for the last few months, and I've recently started Silverlight development.

Most of the time things go OK, especially for the simple stuff, but frequently I get stumped by seemingly simple things - especially in XAML. As an example, yesterday I was trying to use a Grid to lay out the items in a ListBox. This worked, but I couldn't get the grid to stretch to fill the width of the ListBox. Only after some hours of searching, forum posts, and experimentation was I able to get it working, but I can't say I have it figured out.

So, my question is how do you learn WPF or Silverlight? - XAML in particular, really. What techniques do you use to understand how controls achieve what they do on the screen, how they are structured, etc. Is there something I'm missing?

Really, this is a major sticking point, and something that Microsoft needs to address to get the hordes of developers up and running with WPF/Silverlight efficiently!

Answer 1

Bill Steele, from Microsoft, has a multi-part webcast series that takes you from the absolute beginning of WPF. I think there are something like 15 episodes. You should be able to find it at Microsoft events by searching WPF Soup To Nuts.

Answer 2

I bought Pro WPF in C# 2008 and found it very useful for WPF, but found it immediately frustrating to deal with differences in binding, VSM, etc. between WPF and Silverlight

Have you had any success with the videos on the http://silverlight.net/Learn/ site? Does anyone have comments on Apress' Pro Silverlight 2 in C# 2008

Answer 3

Go here for WPF stuff. Go here for Silverlight.

Both are reliable sources.

Answer 4

Check the web site for your local library.

I live in Boston, MA. Buried deep in their web site is a free subscription to Safari Books Online, which has thousands of tech and business books from top publishers including O'Reilly, etc.

Buried on another page is a web form you can fill out to have them send you a library card number via email. The library card number gets you access to the tech books.

There are also free audiobooks on another page. Not for tech, but there is life after programming!

Adam Leffert

Answer 5

I think that Expression Blend is an important tool when starting out with Silverlight as the xaml writing doesn't come easy in the beginning and you have to concentrate more on the xaml errors than on the overall system of things and actual visual results.

Later on one will definitely end up tweaking (ok cleaning) the massive code that Blend creates and from there to writing XAML by hand as developers like to live in VS and firing Blend is an extra move.

This was the beginning and I hope that after a few months you are past that. Although to this day (8 months in) I still have some stuff I feel more comfortable doing in Blend.

From there on I moved to msdn documentation - although intellisense gives us all possible properties and their values the documentation can give us answers what it actually is. For me it was kind of a step to come to to first open the e.g DockPanel documentation in msdn not to start guessing what parameter x does.

This reminds me of another problem I had with Silverlight - as I was completely new to Microsoft technologies then at first I had real trouble navigating the msdn documentation. Seems silly now, but I couldn't find anything from there. So important part of learning new technologies is to learn the structure of the documentation :).

Answer 6

I have worked my way through "Pro Silverlight 2" and I found every chapter very detailed and thorough. I also referred to SAMS "Silverlight 2 Unleashed", that book is a good complement to "Pro Silverlight 2". Also, have a look at "Silverlight Tip Of The Day" and Jesse Liberty's blog for some handy tips.

HTH, Indy