WPF and Silverlight are both XAML based platforms but there are some important functionality and implementation differences between the two.
For the full scoop on the differences between WPF and Silverlight, download the whitepaper "Programmatic Differences Between Silverlight and WPF" written by the folks at Wintellect.
Here’s the first in the series of comics about developers coming from Microsoft:
A simple challenge to all developers building user interfaces: think for a moment before making a form overly complicated. The form below is for reverse phone number lookups:
This form contains three fields for what is basically one thing: a telephone number. There is some JavaScript in there that bounces focus from one field to the next as you type, which is convenient unless you need to go back to edit the last field.
You know what this form really does? It offloads data formatting / parsing work to the end user. It is trivial to write server code that extracts only the digits from a free form telephone field. There is no good reason to make the user think this hard to enter a phone number.
If you build forms, especially web forms, you need to watch Luke Wroblewski’s session from MIX09. Despite the unassuming title of "Web Form Design," the session contains a lot of tips about designing forms with users in mind:
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C17F
Luke’s guidance is infinitely more useful than this little rant of a post and is backed up by data.
Want to be more productive as a developer? There’s some cool stuff you can do with code snippets in Visual Studio. Brian Noyes has a good overview on here, including some things I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not know.
If you’re interested in productivity, you might also be interested in the Visual Studio ASPX Edit Helper, a little tool a whipped up one afternoon and have never updated. :) (Hey, the source code is there for download if you want to beef it up).
