Transitioning from Windows Forms to WPF

Question

For a long time now, I have been stuck with Windows Forms development (started with VB6, and has continued through to C# .NET 4.5), and I have pretty much hit the limit of w

Answer 1

I know this is an old question but for the benefit of anyone else looking at this, I think I should redress the balance a bit - reading some of the other answers, I get the feeling that some of the 'don't use the designer' sentiment comes from not using it properly. This tutorial is quite good to get you going and answers some of the criticisms in the other posts.

For instance, you can switch from the Winforms-like margin-based layout that is the default when you drop a control, to a more WPF-ish style by right-clicking and selecting 'Reset Layout'

This video covers similar ground.

I still prefer the VS2010 designer on balance - VS2013 seems to be a bit buggy when dragging and dropping onto TabItems **, (which my current project uses a lot) - but the VS2013 Document Outline view lets you move things around in that view too, which can be a real plus.

Really, though, to get the most out of WPF and xaml you need to be reasonably fluent in both the designer view and the xaml view and switching between them; if you shy away from the designer, you are missing out on something that can help you a lot.

** Edit - although this seems to have been improved in Update 3 for VS 2013, and in previews of VS14, to date I still get odd behaviour at times.