WPF, ECO and Expression Blend … it works!

After a weekend of reading, more reading, and listening to conference sessions about WPF I finally had the guts to try writing an ECO application with WPF. And wow … it worked. I have still some things to work out and I will do my best to pitch some ideas to the ECO development team what I would like to see in the future with regard to WPF… but writing applications is possible already. The ECO space has design time support and you can use XAML to bind to ECO objects. As I am still a beginner regarding XAML, I use Blend for a lot of things. I also would like to be able to bind to ECO domain objects instead of “regular” .NET objects using a IValueConverter, but I have still some learning to do before I will be able to set that up.

My estimate was right that the learning curve is pretty high to get started with WPF. However, it really pays off in the end. The possibilities are endless with regard to component design and behavior. Blend gives you the power to buil your own custom component set without having to be a component devleoper per se.

Finally, I want to show you a screenshot of a 10 line app that uses WPF to display the album covers of my CD collection model. I actually really used the ECO package that I created using Delphi for .NET. The XAML was completely generated by Blend and has not been modified manually.

Click on the picture to see some “surrounding” bits taken from Blend. Note that the cover items in the listbox have shadows added to them using the shadow bitmap effect of WPF.