Anne Marsan: Software for Engineers

Step 1. Get a book

I want to keep up with the times, and to that end I'm starting to learn Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

But first, my UI history. For most of my career I was not a software developer per se, but rather an engineer who spent most of her time developing software tools to get the job done. Most engineers aren't terribly bothered by UIs. They either don't have a strong aesthetic streak or have been beaten down by stingy managers, and will accept a text-based shell interface as long as it spits out numbers that sort of look right.

But so much of engineering is visual, so I always felt that if we're going to display graphical information, we might as well also incorporate a graphical user interface into the software. I always thought that it would be easier to use, and learn how to use, a piece of software if it has a graphical user interface (though in reality, this isn't always the case!). So I took the time to learn how to add a graphical user interface to the software I was developing.

1994 - Started to learn X Windows/Motif. I worked exclusively on Unix systems back then (SGI, Sun, and IBM RISC). I got pretty good at this. I also learned some OpenGL because my work was mostly in computational geometry.

2000 - The place that I worked at took away our SGI workstations, leaving us with PCs running Windows. Our team was forced to learn something new. How cruel. We looked for the closest thing to Motif, which was Win32. I got pretty good at this. I learned GDI, because I was still doing graphical stuff. I also learned the Cosmo VRML library, and learned how to do rudimentary GUIs in MATLAB.

2007 - I came to SRT and was finally forced into the 21st century; I started to do .NET and WinForms development. I've gotten pretty good at it. Along the way, occasionally a customer wants some data plotted on the screen, so I've learned a little Tee-Chart, ZedGraph, and Microsoft's .NET visualization library.

2009 - I am volunteering, yes volunteering, to learn WPF. No one has taken anything away. I don't currently have a client requesting WPF. I'm doing this so I can suggest WPF to clients if it seems appropriate.

So how to learn WPF? On the suggestion of a couple of co-workers, I got the book:

• Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed, Adam Nathan, 2007.

It has been a good starting point. I've also found a few series on CodeProject that have been helpful:

• Josh Smith's A Guided Tour of WPF
• Sasha Barber's WPF: A Beginner's Guide
• Josh Fischer's Visual Quick Start series

Awhile back, when I first wanted to start learning WPF (I was distracted along the way), I read several of the

• Scott Hanselman BabySmash blog posts.

So now onto the actual learning...