I was recently preparing for a presentation on WPF and was trying to figure out how to get people to grasp the concept of XAML and how it applied to WPF and Winforms programming and it dawned on me. Since XAML is a declarative way of expressing objects and since ASP.NET although not XAML does the same thing when you use an ASP.NET server controls or apply the runat=”server” attribute to a standard HTML control aren’t these two similar in concept? Well in a way yes. So with this bright light beaming in my otherwise dull brain at the 9:00pm hour (yes I am an early to sleep early to rise person) I remembered a comment that one of the developers who created the NorthFace WPF demo that was demonstrated at the PDC said “I was relatively easy for our web developers to pick up this programming paradigm”. So for those of you who currently programming in the ASP.NET world and are looking at WPF in some ways you can think of WPF in much the same way you think of ASP.NET. The markup representation of the UI is what will be shown to the user. Yes you can attach events to elements like OnClick=”MyButtonOnClick” and have the event handler in the code behind. Yes you have the concept of template based controls, the concept of container controls, the concept of styles and databinding. True some of this stuff is implemented differently but you are not starting over from scratch, just enhancing the concepts you are already familiar with. So what about the Winforms developer you say. Well this is were my analogy from the web world starts to break down and a new blog begins.

Stay tuned……