D2SIG Meeting Notes

I attended the D2SIG meeting last night at the Microsoft offices in Houston. Claudio Lassala from EPS gave a good talk on Data Binding in WPF. He came prepared with a number of good examples of different techniques that explained not only the current thinking on data binding, but also some of the earlier techniques that fell short. Claudio knows his stuff, and dived down into the code frequently to make his points.

He covered DependencyObject, INotifyPropertyChanged, ObjectDataProvider, basic data binding with static resources, Data Templates, relative source binding, Value Converters, and many many more. It slices, it dices, it chops, it juliennes fries.

Along the way there was some good give and take with the audience. There were several people speaking up who were either working with data binding or about to. Side topics included mention of MVVM, Prism (Glenn Block), WPF Toolkit, and MVC.

I'm going to have to start attending D2SIG on a regular basis. I decided a few weeks back to focus on WPF and MVVM as "force multipliers" for PC PIC-Guam. I need to get a lot of result for as little effort as possible in order to stick to my 1000 hour time budget. I also need to get a lot of quality out of my UI design work (such as it is). This D2SIG will help with both.

WPF resources I've read lately (and will understand better in the future) include

• MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-502): Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 Windows Presentation Foundation

• Data and WPF: Customize Data Display with Data Binding and WPF

• Data Points: Data Binding in WPF

• Advanced WPF: Understanding Routed Events and Commands in WPF

• Patterns: WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern

• WPF Docking Library
  

I took notes during the presentation. For a 2 hour meeting, I came up with an estimate of five and a half hours of follow up tasks!