WPF Forms over Data Gets Easier in Visual Studio 2010

Published 25 November 08 07:48 PM

Today I was looking at comments on one of my WPF videos on how to create a Master-Detail form in WPF and I had to agree:

"I was looking into learning WPF - but jeez, what happened to RAD?  It takes all this to create a simple Master/Detail form?"

(BTW, Sorry I couldn't respond on the site itself, I've been having problems with my site login.)

Designing WPF forms that work with data in Visual Studio 2008 is tedious (to say the least) -- you have to hook up all the data binding in XAML and code. It's not hard, it's just time consuming. (BTW, here's the link to all the WPF videos I've done on this topic so far.)

Well luckily Visual Studio 2010 will enable drag-drop data binding in WPF! Milind Lele, the Program Manager on this feature, blogged about it here and here. I'm heading to DevTeach on Monday and I just picked up another session, one on WPF data binding. I plan on showing this feature of VS 2010 at the end and I think it will be a big hit, especially to those who are building business applications in WPF today.

If you want to try it out (and have a few hours to spend downloading ;-)) then you can pick up a copy of the Visual Studio 2010 Community Tech Preview (CTP) which is distributed as a VPC. Otherwise come back here for more info on this, I'll be playing with it myself...  ;-)

Enjoy!

by Beth Massi
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# infoblog » WPF Forms over Data Gets Easier in Visual Studio 2010 said on November 25, 2008 11:16 PM:

PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/index.php/2008/11/26/wpf-forms-over-data-gets-easier-in-visual-studio-2010/

# Waleed El-Badry said on November 26, 2008 9:53 AM:

It is good to hear that. WPF is an amazing technology. I'm glad that Microsoft Developing team took binding data into consideration.

# Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB said on November 26, 2008 12:54 PM:

And speaking of RAD with WPF .... I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele , Program Manager

# VB Feeds said on November 26, 2008 2:08 PM:

And speaking of RAD with WPF .... I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele , Program Manager

# VB Feeds said on November 26, 2008 5:23 PM:

I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele , Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools

# Adrian Schindler said on November 27, 2008 11:17 AM:

it is good news, but working with data is , most of the time, working with text data. until wpf team is doing something with font rendering all that effort is useless ( i tried to work with wpf over data and i had to give up, for now ... the data is very hard to read with that blurry fonts )

# Halo_Four said on November 28, 2008 12:43 PM:

The really interesting thing is that Microsoft Expression Blend has always had a pretty decent data binding experience within the designer.  It isn't quite drag-and-drop, but you can quite easily control the binding parameters from directly within the property grid.  I would like to see both and really hope that in an attempt to make data binding simple-stupid that you don't overshoot and end up with something simple for the most insanely basic data binding scenarios and nothing for anything with the slightest level of complexity.

I really hope that the Visual Studio/Cider team take a page from the Blend team and enable complete data binding and resource binding support from directly in the property grid.  Even better, if both teams could work on a property grid that could be shared between the products that would be useful.  The WPF team and designer teams need to work on supporting a designer infrastructure that is also shared between Cider and Blend so that WPF controls developed by Microsoft (including those that come with WPF) and third parties can have real design-time support.

WPF is an amazing framework but I seriously think Microsoft sells it short with a lackluster design time experience.  It doesn't help that WPF is overshadowed by Silverlight, where the design time experience, especially in Cider, is even worse.

# Beth Massi said on December 10, 2008 10:03 PM:

Hi Halo_Four,

Totally agree -- that's why they're working on bring RAD to WPF in VS 2010. WPF is the framework, now we need to tools to actually develop with it mainstream. Tools are always be behind the framework development. Thanks for the great feedback!

Cheers,

-B

# Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB said on December 19, 2008 2:08 PM:

The first episode in a series on VS 2010 was posted this week on Channel 9. The series is put on by some

# Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB said on January 7, 2009 6:03 PM:

I'm still catching up from holiday vacation so I just watched my dnrTV episode today that I filmed with

# VB Feeds said on January 7, 2009 10:01 PM:

I'm still catching up from holiday vacation so I just watched my dnrTV episode today that I filmed

# phil richard said on January 18, 2009 2:53 PM:

Reply to my email about my inabilty to link to a database in vb2008 express

tks

phil

# Logan said on February 9, 2009 10:30 AM:

I'm kinda lost as far as all this goes.

Beth, I'd like to get some input from you - what with you being a professional in your field and all - on something.

I'm still sitting with VS 2005. I don't have the 3GB to download a trial of VS 2008 or even the +/-750mb to download the ISO file of the express editions.

I see that VS2010 is coming out soon too, so I'm roughly 5 years behind in my education.

What I'm asking here is do you have any suggestions for me on ways I could catch up a little?

-L

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About Beth Massi

Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.

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