WPF without Visual Studio?

Question

Would it be practical to create WPF applications without ever touching Visual Studio (or any other IDEs)? As in, coding and compiling completely within Vim and the command-line? What resources would you recommend for someone trying to do so?

Answer 1

It would be possible, since basically WPF is based on XAML - a variant of XML - and C# or VB.NET or another .NET language as its backend language.

The question really is whether that's practical and if it makes sense - I highly doubt it. WPF is all about visual design, e.g. totally without a visual designer (either the built-in one in Visual Studio, preferably the 2010 version; or some other visual designer), it seems a bit silly to want to program WPF....

As for resources - well, a least a text editor is a must, then definitely a few good books on WPF, and you could leverage the C# or VB.NET compiler that comes with the .NET framework.