PDC05: Day Three (WPF "Avalon": a lap around the Windows Presentation Foundation")

The topic of Rob Relyea's (blog) presentation was quite engaging for me "WPF ("Avalon"): A Lap around Windows Presentation Foundation". The entire presentation was a long demo of making a small application using WPF. There was a lot of focus on the capabilities of XAML files and how to connect XAML to your managed code. The presentation and demo is worth reviewing later to provide a nice baseline. The real software star was actually Mobiform's Aurora XAML authoring tool. The demo would have been much harder to follow without that tool. I did notice that Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) looked really unstable on his machine. I hope it stablizes a bit more before release. The neat trick of the session was using Illustrator to export a vector graphic to XAML and then inserting that into the window's XAML file. This gives you scalable graphics rather than stretched bitmaps as you change the window size. Hot, Hot Hot!