I want to learn WPF. Do you have any starting project suggestions? [closed]

Question

So far, most of my GUI programming has been done in C++ with the Qt Framework, I'd like to branch out a little bit and do some C# with WPF. Originally, I wanted to write something like Adium for Windows, but that seems a tad...ambitious for a starting project. I'm not even sure if you can call libpurple stuff from C#, but I'd like to find out.

However, it seems my imagination is rather lacking and I'm having trouble thinking of something that isn't either completely trivial (a text editor! a calculator! wee!) or rather hard (something with libpurple).

So, any suggestions?

I don't want to write a calculator (even if it seems a rather fitting starting project for a GUI framework)!

Answer 1

A long time ago I started the "Quest for the Perfect Project" with a few colleagues - the idea was that we'd try to do everything as well as we possibly could, fully test-driven etc, while learning WPF, WCF etc. We reckoned that Battleships would be a really good game. You can start off relatively simply, but there are lots of ways to extend it over time.

We never actually got anywhere with the project, mostly because we all ended up at different companies and I started writing C# in Depth, but I still think Battleships was a good game to use for learning.

Start off with a two player, single screen, local-only game, and then work out network play, AI, variations for more than two players, leagues, chat etc.

(When running as a single screen it would be seriously non-ideal as an actual game - each player would have to look away while setting up the ships to start with, and if any player wanted to see their own ships later on to get an idea of how close the other player was, that other player would have to look away. It would be great for making sure you've got a working game engine though.)

Answer 2

My favorite open source WPF application I've seen so far is Family.Show, a simple genealogy application that seems to use WPF really well. The source code is available on CodePlex.

_{(source: vertigo.com)}

Answer 3

Try taking a look at Coding4Fun. There are a few WPF projects on there that might be of use to you, including a version of Sudoku. You can either use the articles to sow some seeds and try to develop the apps yourself, or just grab the code and pull it apart to see how it all works.