I mentioned that I was starting to tinker with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Basic 2008. Microsoft’s technologies aren’t something I get to use in my day to day work anymore and the amount of work I do for Izea at home leaves me precious little time to dive into anything in detail these days. With that in mind, getting up to speed with VS2008 and the entire family of technologies it encompasses is daunting, to say the least.
.NET was always an intimidating framework to get up to speed on. Within the .NET framework you have extensive tools for everything from industrial grade crypto, through Web development, data access, threading, system security, serialization… the list goes on. In fact, even just looking at one particular area, desktop development, there are now two huge sub frameworks to choose between; Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation.
I’ve always found that just tinkering with something for the sake of tinkering doesn’t really get me very far. I need something to focus on, a goal to aim for. Given my time constraints it needs to be something I can pick up and set down as and when the mood takes me. I started digging through old code last night and found two ideal candidates.
“Vault” is an application I wrote way back in 2002. It’s a password and credential management system that I use to store my bank details, credit card info, system logons, and software serial keys. I wrote it to get to grips with .NET’s XML support and strong encryption. I’ve decided to see what I can do to overhaul it and give it a shiny new WPF user interface. The code was also written in Visual Basic.NET, so it’s a good first app to tackle since I want to start to really explore what’s new in VB2008.
The second app is “Davenista”. It’s a play on words. I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, so I wrote a small application some years back (2002 again I think) called Davenista to manage GTD contexts, projects, action items and so on. Again, I’ll see what I can do about sticking a shiny new WPF interface on this one, but also add in rich text support for notes on action items and integration with Office 2007. That’s a big task though and may not even happen if Vault kicks me in the ass.
I’ve started reading up on all things WPF and it’s scary as hell. Windows Forms I knew pretty well inside and out, but WPF is a whole new paradigm shift. Additionally, I’m utter shite when it comes to visual design. Working with Windows Forms afforded me the luxury of being able to bolt other people’s designs into place to build a user interface. With WPF though you’re really not getting into the spirit of things unless you start using all the cool new visual templating stuff. My first few attempts at this have been complete ass from a look and feel standpoint. So, no screenshots!
One resource I’ve found that’s really helping get up to speed fast is WindowsClient.net. They link to a ton of great articles, but also have video walkthroughs of some of the scarier aspects of WPF that have been most helpful.
