Newbie - can WPF make this look great
Hi,
I'm just reading up about WPF and seen Bill Steele's Soup and Nuts webcast (so far) and now have a work related project thats arrived. I was going to do this in standard windows form app but suddenly realised that is probably a candiate to be WPFd' however I dont really have much of an idea what is possible so I'd welcome some advice.
The main purpose of the work would be to visualise data (csv file) representing 2 way network streams between 6 devices over 5 minutes (in real or accelerated time) with pixel colouring based on some algorithm based on the CSV file data, there is a 100 data entries per second for each device. So over the 5 minutes you would see a gui trace go green-amber-red etc. I was basically just going to have a 600pixel wide display and give 120 pixels for each minute and go from there for each device
Other than some form of flashy wpf slider bar could much else could be done with WPF to make this data visualisation come alive ?
Many thanks
nick
WPF specializes in data visualization. If you are very new to WPF, I suggest giving yourself at least 2 weeks to get used to the fundamentals.
The simplest solution, you could have a vector based <Border/> element, where you set the Background property to whatever your algorithm dictates. You can get wild and have a 3d animated object who has a spotlight on it that changes to your color. You could implement a 3d pie graph (theres one on codeproject.com) or a nice looking line graph to visualize the history of your data states.
There's just so much you can do, you might want to hunt for other wpf video just to get the creative juices goin.
I got to warn you though, once you get used to WPF, you never want to do Winforms again 
-Jer
Hi Jer,
Thanks for the reply - wild sounds good ocne the basics are sorted!
I'll investigate the <Border/>!
Can this be done in VS2008 (which I have) or Expression blend (which I dont) Or do you do the gui bits in EB and drop back to VS for the .cs coding ?
Thanks again
nick
I would suggest grabbing a copy of Blend2 (its beta so its downloadable at the moment) and open the same project (at the same time) in blend and VS2k8. I usually design my gui in blend, then do what you said and drop back to VS for coding. It works very well this way as both programs detect changes to project files and notify you to reload them.
And don't stop at just using the <Border/>...It's just a very simple example I was giving .
