One of the great blessings of our time is the hundreds of resources available, on the Internet, that provide guidance when your are stuck with a coding problem. The same is true when you want to learn a new language, there are plenty of blogs and other sites on the Internet that talk about WPF and Silverlight. Many of these sites have tutorials and code walkthroughs.
Hands on training is another way to learn a new programming skill. You can choose from several companies that teach WPF/Silverlight courses. I teach an intensive five day WPF course that will get you and your team-mates quickly up to speed on the latest WPF goodness. If you are interested in hands-on training for your company or group contact me for more details.
Quotes from students
I went to a 3-day training course last week, led by trainer extraordinaire, Walt Ritscher and man was it impressive! Having worked at Infragistics, I have been well-exposed to all of the marketing buzz around WPF. Unfortunately, being the Webinary I am, I was not really exposed to the real meat and potatoes and ended up waiting until this offer of training came my way to finally get a taste of it. Walt came in, took an exciting topic, and really brought it to life. His informative, direct, knowledgeable, and (above all) enthusiastic approach to the course material really sparked my interest in WPF. I just sat through three days of intense training, watching slide after slide and demo after demo and saying "Wow…" every few minutes.
My problem with a lot of technologies (including WPF and even Silverlight) is that I see the marketing and say, "Yeah… that’s cool – now I just need to hire myself a graphical designer and I’m good to go." It’s hard to get a feel for how I, the developer, fit in to this new media-rich world. Generally, I just end up learning the syntax, etc. and end up realizing the full potential later on, once I’ve got the technical stuff done. But this time with WPF, Walt was able – through a fine blend of instruction and demo – show me, the graphically-challenged developer, how quickly and easily I can take this new platform and leverage it to build very impressive solutions. In fact, these impressions extended all the way into my thoughts about Silverlight, since the two are so closely related.
Came only for Ritscher’s WPF [sessions]. Fabulous! His software allows him to demo a lot of ideas really fast. Better than any other presenter I’ve seen for ideas per hour.
April 2009
The labs were well designed. They were interesting and usually required me to think about what I was doing – not just copy code off the page. They also skillfully avoided tedious data entry that is too common in programming classes.August 2008
Walt is a very good instructor and really understands WPF.
Great idea having some lab example "starters" distributed at the beginning of the class.
Walt answered a bunch of questions for me that helped. We could have used this back in November.-Hank
Here’s what one attendee to a recent NET 3.0 road-show said after the event:
I attended this event to learn mostly about WCF and WF. I was expecting WPF to be a big waste of time. Not only did Walt do an excellent job explaining the benefits of Windows Presentation Foundation but he made a convert out of me. I never realized how extensive WPF is, or how it simplifies so many UI design tasks. If I had to a pick a favorite from the topics it would have to be Styles and Templates. Wow! Powerful stuff. We are going to be using WCF in our next release, no doubt about that, but after seeing WPF I’ve already planned several UI improvements for our existing application and I’ll be using WPF for them.”
seems like u worked hard for that and this website!!