Thursday, May 27, 2010

Essential Tools for the WPF Novice

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is simultaneously enticing and intimidating. It offers potential for amazing flexibility in UI design but there is a mountain of learning to climb. At the time of writing I am still very much in the foothills, gazing upward. This is my second article on WPF wherein I attempt to give both you and me a “leg up” on the WPF climb from a unique perspective. In this article I present a collection of little known but useful utility applications that can assist you as you learn and develop WPF code.

Notice: This article is heavily dependent on a collection of links to external sites. They were all accurate at press time but by the time you read this one or more could easily have changed or evaporated. That is just the nature of the beast...

SDK XAML Browser

The SDK XAML Browser from Microsoft lets you select a layout container or control in the navigation panel, then shows you the XAML and a rendering of the control in isolation in the main panel.

Type Explorer

XamlT—short for XAML Type Explorer—provides a unique interface to examining class diagrams specifically for WPF classes.

Gradient Editor

This Gradient Editor lets you define a color gradient graphically with an arbitrary number of bands and returns a XAML code fragment for you to paste into your application.

Read more: simple-talk

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