(Note: If in Ireland/Northern Ireland and you are are interested in learning more about WPF, would like to attend a WPF Bootcamp or are interested in “pimping that GUI” by adding a little WPF to your existing application via forms-interop then contact me  for more details).

If you’re weighing up your options for a front-end for your next LOB application then check out this amazing Smart Office application from Lawson. Smart Office is a front-end to Lawson’s suite of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and as you might have guessed, it’s written in WPF. It’s a great example of providing a fantastic user experience in an enterprise application, providing each user with a personalised experience via their own “information workspace”, as shown below:

But don’t take my word for it - to see a walkthrough of the application, watch this Channel 9 video. If you want to add a little of the same to one of your applications then be sure to check out the recent release of.NET 3.5 SP1 and the Client Profile and of course the improvements for WPF projects and the WPF designer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, including

• Events tab support within the property browser (I know for a fact some of you have been waiting on this!)
• Ability to sort properties alphabetically in the property browser
• Margin snaplines which makes form layout much quicker
• Better designer support for TabControl, Expander, and Grid
• Code initiated refactoring now updates your XAML (including both control declarations and event declarations in XAML)
• Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML

If you’re in Ireland / Northern Ireland are are interested in learning more about WPF, would like to attend a WPF Bootcamp or are interested in “pimping that GUI” by adding a little WPF to your existing application via forms-interop then contact me  for more details.