What you should know before watching

- [Instructor] So what should you know before beginning this course? This is the first course in a multi-part series on Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft's newest and most flexible desktop application framework. I'll be working with the WPF projects in Visual Studio, which means I'll spend the majority of the course working inside the Visual Studio application. Therefore, some experience with Visual Studio, the full-featured Microsoft developer IDE, is a plus. In this course, I'll be working with Visual Studio 2015.

The WPF tools are also available for Visual Studio 2013 and earlier versions. To be clear, 2015 has the best WPF tools, so I recommend you get a copy. The free community edition has all the tools you need for the course. I suggest you install the latest updates for Visual Studio 2015. That is Update 3. There are a number of courses available to help you learn how to work with Visual Studio. This playlist is available on our site. It lists all the Visual Studio 2015 courses in our catalog.

The example application code for the course is C#, so naturally, I'll be working with solutions and projects that contain code. I usually program in C#, so that's the language I'll use in the course. I assume that you know .NET and C#. For this course, a competence in the .NET types and type numbers like properties and events is helpful. If you want to learn more about C#, there is a playlist on our website that lists all the relevant C# courses. WPF uses XAML, Microsoft's Extensible Application Markup Language.

It's my opinion that all competent WPF developers should understand XAML and be comfortable reading and writing it during development. If you are new to XAML, check out my XAML series. It's a good primer to watch before taking this course. In that series, I look at key principles, like XAML-based properties and events. I look at object elements, and how XAML maps to the .NET type system. I explore markup extensions, type converters, resources, and resource dictionaries. Plus, I investigate the new dependency and attached property system.

It's this system that provides key benefits that make control templates and data binding work in WPF. Finally, XAML is based on XML, so that suggests you should have some basic understanding of XML. If XML is new to you, I suggest you search our site for some courses to help you learn this important markup language. The minimum knowledge you need to understand is XML namespaces, elements, and attributes.