Question

I want to write a little application for myself to learn C# and WPF.

The typical hello world in 2009 (twitter client) seems boring. I would like to hear your stands should I do a twitter client? Any other starters I could play around with and get used to c#? (I’m a longtime PHP programmer)

Answer 1

A Twitter client ends up being a good way to get started with WPF, for a few reasons:

• It’s got lists of data with images, which gives you practice with formatting and styling lists
• There are a lot of options for styling what you’re working on – partly due to the avatars, limited text blocks, etc.
• A Twitter app is the kind of application where you expect to see good UI
• There are some good libraries availble (I highly reccommed tweet#) so you don’t need to bother with any of the plumbing
• It’s something you can show off and be proud of – people will understand what it does
• There are plenty of complex things you can add on later if you want – skinning, drag and drop, autocomplete, spell checking, etc.
• There are some open source WPF clients out there, so you can find some sample code if you get stuck

And the number 1 reason why it’s good idea… you can start contributing your code to the Witty project. We’d love more help!