This introduction to the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) explains the basic concepts, tools and techniques required to build and distribute Rich Interactive Applications using Expression Blend, Expression Design and Visual Studio along with the WPF API. This is a 300 level course, meaning that you should already be familiar with 100 and 200 level course content that explains C# or Visual Basic, Visual Studio, XML and Windows Forms.

Videos in this series:

WPF301_01_01 – Series Introduction

This video will outline the goals and pre-requisites of this video series.

WPF301_01_02 – Differences Between WPF and Windows Forms

To continue the introduction to WPF, this video outlines the major differences between WPF and Windows Forms and in doing so, explains the major strengths as well as explains the upcoming topic matter in this series.

WPF301_01_03 – Building a Hello World App using Blend and Visual Studio

In this video we demonstrate the simplest application to show the workflow of creating and triggering a Storyboard in Blend, and writing event handler code in C# using Visual Studio.

WPF301_01_04 – Anatomy of a WPF Application

In this video we look at the code and the project files that comprise the Hello World project created in the previous video. We spend time talking about the XAML and what it represents and how it maps to the C# code files. Finally, we talk about the differences between creating a project in Blend versus Visual Studio.

WPF301_01_05 – Understanding XAML

In this video we look at XAML’s object element syntax that is used to declaratively represent instances of classes and their properties. We discuss at the XAML syntax itself noting how XAML elements map to WPF API classes. Also, we spend time talking about three ways WPF object instance properties are represented in XAML: via simple attributes, property element syntax (think:nesting elements representing properties) and markup extensions (curly brace syntax). We talk briefly about Attached Properties and how they work … by each WPF control implementing DependencyObject. (We’ll talk about this at length in another video.) Finally, we review the mapping of XAML to C# or VB code and how event handlers are invoked.