Development Frameworks
I’ve gotten a number of emails from people who are really psyched about Surface and are wondering how to best prepare themselves to eventually be able to build killer apps for it. My best advice is to start building up expertise in the latest .NET UI frameworks since one of our goals is to make sure those skills are directly transferable to Surface.
Our SDK has two layers: Core & WPF. The Core layer officially supports any .NET UI framework that provides an hwnd but is designed specifically with XNA in mind. The WPF layer provides the same functionality as the Core layer but it does so in a way that is highly consistent with WPF’s model for input & controls.
For those learning WPF, pay close attention to Dependency Properties & Routed Events. These are important concepts that I’ve noticed people often gloss over. Understanding how they work and knowing how to leverage them will have a big impact on your productivity in building Surface apps (and WPF apps in general).
I’ll elaborate a bit more on our WPF integration in later posts.
-Robert
