I’ve had more free time lately, and because of that I have been able to catch up on some of the newer offerings in the .Net world.  I started with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for a couple of reasons:

1. Silverlight is a subset, so I figured if I want to learn both I may as well look at WPF first.
2. Even though the Lebowskis administration functionality is web-based, it seems that creating a new administration application with WPF would be a good example application to try out.

I didn’t really look too much for any “Hello World” or any other such “getting started” examples, I just dove in and hacked around.  But it wasn’t until I decided to look at Silverlight in greater detail that I really started to grasp some of the concepts.  The biggest help I had in starting out was Scott Guthrie’s Silverlight 2 tutorial.  For those who don’t know, Scott Guthrie’s blog is an excellent resource for .Net development, particularly for those who toil in the presentation tier (ASP.net, WPF, Silverlight, etc.).

One thing that I did find out from this learning exercise is that WPF / Silverlight did come fairly easy to me – particularly the hand-editing of the XAML.  Since I was using the Silverlight tools for Visual Studio, I had to hand-edit the XAML controls instead of using the good ol’ “drag and drop”.  I’m sure that the biggest reason for this is that I have done a lot more web development than windows development, and I have been hand-editing my HTML since 1996!  Regardless, at least I can say that I have at least started to look at WPF and Silverlight, there is plenty more to learn!