The blog of dlaa.me

With all that's going on lately, more and more people are moving their development efforts to Silverlight and WPF. What's nice is that there are already a lot of great resources available to help developers learn the basics of Silverlight and WPF programming. Whether you prefer books, videos, blogs, etc., there's no shortage of material out there to help you get started!

But what about the next stage? What do you do to learn the finer points of the platform? The subtle nuances? The tricks? The traps??

One of my goals for this blog is to help intermediate and advanced developers shed their inhibitions and get more intimately involved with the platform. Therefore, many of my posts push the boundaries or do things in ways that might not be completely obvious to a newcomer. But there's another facet to becoming a proficient developer - learning best practices and incorporating them into your daily routine. To that end, I'll be doing a new series of posts tagged "Development Tips"!

The idea is that each tip will include a short, clear directive, a brief, easy to understand explanation, a simple example, and a few links to more information. Some of the tips are bound to be things just about everyone knows, while others will probably be new to some of you. Some can be found in the documentation for the platform, but others will be simple conventions that have been found to make life easier. And though there are exceptions to every rule, I won't be calling them out because I want to keep the recommendations clear and concise.

I'm going to try to avoid controversial topics, but it would be silly not to expect some discontent every now and then. :) If you disagree with something I've written, please leave a comment explaining why you disagree what you recommend instead. I'll follow up on comments like that and if there are enough people who call me out on something, I'll revisit the topic in a new post highlighting the controversy. Of course, I'm not claiming that anything I recommend is definitively the best technique! Every situation is different and everyone has their own favorite ways of doing things. Rather, I'd like to share some tips that I've found to work well in my experience - and that seem likely to help others in similar situations.

Okay, enough boring background already - the next post will be the first of the Development Tips!

 

PS - That link in the previous sentence takes you to my blog's tag filter for "Development Tips". I'll tag every tip like that so it will be easy to see them all in one place.