TechEd - Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in the Real World: Zurich Airport Monitoring System
This session had an enormous WOW factor. I was really impressed with the way Ronnie Saurenmann from Microsoft Schweiz GmbH used WPF to build an airport monitoring system. The basis was a completely digitized map from a GIS system which was translated into vectors. Buttons in the shape of images floated around the airport to indicate plains taking-off, landing and moving around the airport buildings. Everything scalable of course, thanks to WPF.
What impressed me most was how easy it is to create a basic map and how simple it is to add events to the WPF application. New for me was, that XAML can also run inside a "normal" WinForms application. That of course offers a lot of new possibilities. It is not always required to build everything in XAML and present it using WPF.
Some lessons learned in this session:
- Now what the limits are for the target hardware. Everything in WPF is vector-based. So the more vectors in your XAML, the more computing power your machine and GPU need.
- The Expression Designer is extremely useful for designing XAML forms. The XAML support in VS 2005 is still somewhat limited. Always use both tools, just make sure you save everything in one tool before moving to the next.
- Expression Designer is also a great tool to start working with WPF. You can really learn a lot about the possibilities of XAML and WPF from that tool.
- WPF is easy to learn, at least it seems that way. It also seems to perform pretty good, although so far I have only seen it being demo'd on dual-core machines.
- You don't need knowledge of DirectX or DirectX3D. That's all hidden for you. You simply design and run.
- WPF looks to me as a very powerful tool to build map based solutions or simulations.
- And last but to me not least: Do not use WPF for stuff that a normal Windows Forms application can do. It needs a lot computing power compared to ordinary WinForms.