As you may have read on my blog, I’m a self taught software developer that started many moons ago with assembler and basic. Using Clipper, Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk, C, C++ as substations I ended up being a Delphi developer for some 8 years (and I still use Delphi).
About a year ago we started an endeavour with Microsoft Surface. It is hard work to get some commercial success (companies are very tight at the moment with their budgets) but still we spend a lot of time getting some things together. We delivered a couple of applications to customers, one large application to one of our partners and even a shrink wrapped Surface product that will be sold through our partner LearningGuide Solutions.
Some time ago I complaint about my struggle to grasp the concepts behind WPF. I can easily say that’s all water under the bridge now. I am fully enjoying WPF/Xaml because of its elegant design and complete separation of code and visuals. Sometimes you need to go into the code behind (or at least you think you need to). Most of times you discover later on that there are more possibilities with the data binding, templates, styles, template selectors and value converters that you thought possible.
I would like to advise every programmer that is looking for some sharper looking applications to dig into WPF/Xaml. It can’t do more than other concepts can, but it will enable you to divide responsibilities amongst your software team members a bit better. At least, that’s what I take from it; our UX designer is now more in his field and programmers can concentrate on code even more, taking advantage of each others strengths.
Keep your eyes open for some Surface announcements later on.
Bye for now,
Bart
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