As part of our Industrial Strength Series, Ian Griffiths of Pluralsight visited Australia for the first time in April 2007  to deliver a 4 day Applied WPF intensive course which afforded experienced .NET developers training in the new programming models and UI features intrinsic to Windows Presentation Foundation, with practical hands-on labs that reinforced these concepts.

Ian Griffiths is a software developer, speaker and author who has written books on Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms and Visual Studio. Based in London, Ian is a highly regarded member of various developer mailing lists and newsgroups. More information about what Ian is up to can be found on his blog at http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly known as 'Avalon') is Microsoft's next-generation presentation layer development platform. (WPF is included with Windows Vista, but can also be installed on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003). WPF allows rich client applications to take full advantage of the graphical capabilities of a modern PC. Its powerful and flexible programming model integrates support for flexible layout, high-quality text, resolution-independent graphics, animation, video and 3D. Whilst it is designed to exploit the full capabilities of today's high-performance graphics cards, it offers high-level abstractions which provide great power to the developer for less development effort than ever before.

Attendees will learn how to build robust, feature complete Windows applications with WPF. Attendees will take away many practical samples, and have a good understanding of when to use which features of the new framework.

This course has been designed for developers with experience in .NET who are interested in learning how to develop applications using the Windows Presentation Foundation. Experience programming in either C# or VB.NET using Visual Studio is required. (Experience with Visual Studio 2005 is ideal, but knowledge of Visual Studio .NET 2003 is sufficient.) Knowledge of UI programming such as Windows Forms or Swing is helpful but not required.

Course Highlights:

• WPF Framework Architecture
• Using Controls – a new approach to UI components
• Layout
• Data Binding
• Styling and Templates
• Graphics
• Resource Management
• Building Custom Controls
• Text, Typography, and Documents
• Printing
• Building Connected WPF Applications

A few questions this course will answer:

• How can I exploit the layout features of WPF to make my application adapt to a variety of screen sizes and display resolutions?
• How can I customise the appearance and behaviour of the built-in WPF controls to meet my application's needs?
• How do I present my application's data to the user?
• How do I integrate graphics into my application to enhance the presentation of information?
• How best can I structure my application development workflow to enable both developers and graphic designers to work productively on a UI?
• How do I build WPF applications that interact with remote systems using web services or other communications technologies?
• What do my custom controls need to do in order to offer the same degree of flexibility and reusability as the built-in controls?