How bad is the WPF Learning Curve? [closed]

Answer 1

It's going to be one of those 'it depends' answers but all it really depends on is if you're the kind of developer that tries to continually improve your skills. If that's the case then it comes down to a couple of things ultimately.

Buy WPF Unleashed (others books are available but I whole-heatedly recommend this one), work through the examples and in about 2 months or so you'll wonder how you ever got things done without it.

It's not rocket science and there are no paradigm shifting concepts to deal with. In fact, if you are used to keeping a good separation between your logic and presentation it should fit right in.

To get to a level of mastery you're probably looking between 6 and 12 months of playing with it.

Good luck.

Answer 2

WPF is different; there is no getting away from that.

My main advice is do not be afraid of XAML; Embrace it, that is where the power is!

Let me explain:-

For me to be productive, I prefer to write XAML in the text view as I can create the bare layout of the window in a few keystrokes. If you regularly type code then this is a very quick way to develop windows. You can then use the Visual editors to make it look pretty.

If you keep in your mind that each element of the XAML will "new" that object and that each attribute of that XAML element is a property of the object, you can think of XAML as object creation and assignments of properties. Very similar to writing code.

If you spend too much time in the visual designer then you do not get to appreciate this, and for some this will slow down the learning curve.

A recent Hanselminutes podcast may interest you.

I also advise strongly to learn early the concepts of Views and View-Models, even if you do not subscribe to all that is part of CompositeWPF as this really does help.

Answer 3

It can be pretty steep.

I spent the better part of a month experimenting with WPF and writing a mock-up of our current product in it without developing an intuition for its databinding model or even figuring out how Microsoft means for it to be used. It took me much less time to grasp the basics of ASP.NET MVC.

[Our application displays/depends on a lot of real time data, and I used the Windows Presentation Foundation book by Nathan. Perhaps another book would have been more appropriate.]

Answer 4

There is a nice article from Karsten Januszewski called Hitting the Curve: On WPF and Productivity you might find interesting:

Let's be clear: WPF comes with a curve. I've now watched a bunch of developers hit that curve. And the curve is steep. We're talking between two weeks to two months of curve depending on the developer and the level of experience/intuition the developer has. There will be moments of total mystification and plenty of moments of illumination. It is at once painful and enjoyable, if the developer delights in the discovery of a deep and well thought out UI platform. It is at once familiar and alien. There are many similarities to other UI development paradigms: styles feel like CSS, well sort of. XAML code behind feels like ASP.NET, well sort of. 3D feels like DX or OpenGL, well sort of. Routed events feel like .NET events, well sort of. Dependent properties feel like properties, well sort of. The list could go on. But admidst these (sort of) familiar metaphors there are so many alien concepts that must be mastered: control templating, storyboards, databinding come to mind immediately. It is not a trivial curve and don't expect to be productive on day 1 or even week 1 or even month 1.

It's all worth it though! ;)

Answer 5

I have been playing with .NET for more than 4 years, mostly Windows Forms applications. Binding is not something unknown and I try to use good practice in all my C# applications. For the past 1 month, I have been learning WPF for the job and I have to admit that it's VERY powerful but a lot harder to achieve things. You can do a lot more and achieve some cool designs with less effort but only once you know how it really works and it's hard because it's huge.

More, debugging is harder - that makes the learning more slow too. The problem I think is the IDE of Visual Studio that doesn't help much in the XAML and you rapidly miss some features of IntelliSense of C# when doing binding or other stuff that now is in a XML tag. I like it but yes, the learning curve is not smooth.