I have been working at Xceed for the better part of 10 years. During this time I have seen the birth of most of our products as well as the evolution in development platforms from Win32 to .NET to WPF.

When we moved our development over to .NET from Win32, there was a learning curve, but mostly there was excitement to finally be able to work on a new framework with a new development language. And although the .NET Framework and C# were new, they were not all that different and things were up and running rather quickly.

At the end of 2005, I left Xceed to have my second child. When I came back a year later, Xceed DataGrid for WPF was in its early stages and development was coming along nicely. Now at this point I knew that we had changed frameworks and that I would need to learn WPF before being able to document the grid, but I was not ready for the “learning cliff” that was waiting for me. I had never felt as much like a novice as I did at the end of that year. I was discouraged, frustrated, and could not grasp why anyone in their right mind would want to use WPF. And don’t get me started on XAML.

After a couple of months of working through WPF, I began to see the light, which was not the oncoming train as I previously thought: things were finally making sense, even XAML.

I have been working with WPF for nearly 2 years now and although I still find some things frustrating, I have come to accept the philosophy behind WPF.

When I actually started writing the documentation for Xceed DataGrid for WPF, I had a talk with Pascal Bourque about how we wanted to present the code snippets in the documentation. Our first instinct was to use both C#/VB and XAML; however, afterwards it was decided that unless the snippet required code-behind, it would be in XAML since that was the “WPF way”. Although I do not regret the decision that we made, it may not have been the best choice to facilitate the transition to WPF.

During the next few weeks/months, I will write a series of posts from the perspective of a WinForms developer who is moving over to WPF and using Xceed DataGrid for WPF to create an LOB application, starting with examples of what I would initially attempt to do with the grid and then move on to its recommended WPF usage.

Feedback and suggestions are welcomed! And don’t panic, it's not that scary!