LearnWPF.com - my new WPF community site

I’ve been spending most of my spare time experimenting with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). One thing that I think is lacking from the WPF world is a sense of community - there are lots of individuals (mostly inside MS, but some outside also) putting up great tips on how to do things, but no sites dedicated to WPF to aggregate that. Whenever somebody showed an interest in WPF and wanted to get started invariably I had to tell them “I’ll email you a link” because there was not an easy-to-remember URL that always pointed to the details needed to download the latest bits. After getting sick of emailing URLs to cool stuff to myself, and copying XAML snippets into text files I decided I needed somewhere to gather all this stuff together, and LearnWPF.com was born. Sadly creating a community web-site for a rich-client technology meant downing my well-liked XAML for something far less exotic. Fortunately I was able to leverage all the great work Darren has done on Single User Blog V2 to create LearnWPF.com. Rather than going for something heavy like CommunityServer I wanted something light and simple that I could customize with impunity. SUBV2 is built around the new WebPart infrastructure in ASP.NET 2.0 (copied from Sharepoint), and designed to be highly skinnable. I was pleased to see after a week of CSS fiddling (and making pretty gradients in the GIMP) I was able to come up with a site that looks almost identical on Mozilla v1.5 and IE6. I was amazed when the site gave a fairly accurate rendering on Safari (given the number of Safari CSS problems my current team has had to deal with during my “real“ work). The “look” for LearnWPF.com is based around the simple premise that you can never have too much brown or orange on the screen at one time, and that everything looks better when you put gradients in the background. I’d like to thank Dominic, Nik, Grant, Darren and Adrian for their feedback on my “look and feel”, I ignored most of their well-founded advice and went with more and more brown and orange. Currently there is not a great deal of material on the site, but I will be working on more tips during the week, and I have already organized for some other contributors also. If you’re reading this and wondering how you can get your WPF goodness up onto LearnWPF.com then get in touch. When I can tear myself away from WPF again to do some ASP.NET coding I am going to add an aggregated WPF feed to the site, exposing an RSS feed of all the WPF-centric weblogs that I know of in a single location. I’ll be continuing to post here - LearnWPF will be more “WPF tutorial” focused while my site will continue to be more “rants and pictures of me in wrestling masks” focused.

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