Houston .NET User Group Meeting – 10.11.07

I attended the Houston .NET User Group (HDNUG) meeting last night and the speaker was Markus Egger. He spoke on the topic of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.

Markus started off talking about the importance of User Interface and put up a graphic of an iPhone. What he said is very true, “All the user cares about is the UI”. He also went into the disadvantages of GDI which is the predecessor to WPF.

Great examples were supplied as well. He gave some great XAML code examples as well as good comparisons between using all XAML, all C# (or VB.NET) and a combination to create WPF applications. Markus also gave us some current applications using WPF, like the upcoming Yahoo Messenger and his own company’s creation Xiine. Xiine is a really cool online content reader. You may want to check it out.

Next he gave us a list of tools that can be used to create WPF applications. They are listed below.

• Visual Studio 2005 w/3.0 Extensions
• Visual Studio 2008
• Expression Studio (Blend, etc)
• XAMLPad
• Some Third Party Apps

The last thing discussed was Silverlight. Markus showed us the Silverlight Airlines website and boy is that sweet. Silverlight definitely looks like the future of the web.

All in all, the presentation was very informative. I walked away with enough information to start dabbling in WPF.

I will update this with a link to the presentation slides when they are made available.

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