I am mostly an ASP.NET developer but after watching Reed show the group the basics of WPF and how easy it was in my opinion compared to winforms I am convinced now that I am going to start doing WPF going forward.

Reed put together some great slides and a basic application to demonstrate the power of WPF. He moved from a basic winform app using event driven development to a converted WPF app with the same event driven style as the winform version. Then he slowly moved his app over to more advanced features of WPF and ended with using the MVVM design pattern.

Reed was kind enough to publish his slides and samples: http://reedcopsey.com/talks/from-windows-forms-to-wpf-with-mvvm/

Here is an excerpt from the page

This talk illustrates how Windows Presentation Foundation can dramatically improve the experience of developers, not just designers. Two versions of a simple application will be demonstrated, one developed using Windows Forms, and one using the same approach in WPF. By showing the same application in both technologies, we will show how a short learning curve can be used to migrate development to WPF.

I’ll then discuss three new features of WPF: Data Binding, Templating, and Commanding. I’ll show how they enable a new application architecture, the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, and illustrate how rethinking our approach to design in terms of these three features allows for huge gains in flexibility, testability, and maintainability of our applications.

Finally, we’ll look at third version of our application, a rewrite of our previous application using the Model-View-ViewModel pattern.

This talk is approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes in length.