Tuesday, April 04, 2006 12:03 PM
by
loufranco
How not to cut yourself
Yesterday, I started looking at WPF, WinFX, XAML, etc. I started with Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths:
Programming Windows Presentation Foundation, but that book was published in September, so it's way out of date. It's a pretty decent read anyway, and I look forward to the release edition, but don't actually try the examples with the Feb CTP, they are from an alternate universe, very much like our world, but with goatees (if you're going to try anyway, check out the
Change Notes).
No, on the bleeding edge, books are
so six months ago. Much better to hit the web. But, google is littered with docs and workarounds from past versions. Only very specific searches are likely to return relevant hits. If books are a fading moment in time, the web is all of those moments at once, all treated equally.
Better to stick with official sources. The official SDK docs are
here, and they are tracking the actual released code pretty well. The
MS WinFX site has some pretty well documented
labs that are only slightly out of date (start with changing your namespace declarations at the top of the XAML files to 2006 versions). And of course, you'll have to have the
latest version of everything. I'm finding that successful builds include lots of reported errors that seem not to be true -- nice of Visual Studio to go ahead and build it anyway. Specifically, imported CLR namespaces in XAML seem to confuse the error reporter, but work as expected.
Kathy Sierra says that all of this is helping me learn:
People usually learn much more from failures than from being shown everything working correctly or as expected. The most memorable learning experiences are usually those where things
are going along fine, making sense, etc. when you suddenly slam into
something that goes terribly wrong. Describing the things that do NOT
work is often more effective than showing how things DO work.
Ok then.