Suggestions for WPF & WCF projects

Question

Hi guys, I am trying to work on a home project so I can get some practice working on WPF & WCF applications. Can anyone give out suggestions on a sample WPF and or WCF applications that I can develop?

Ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Maybe a peer to peer program ?

Answer 2

Not sure...I learned the 2 technologies by writing a facebook API based on WCF and writing a WPF frontend to browse the albums of my friends. My reasoning was that if WCF can do form-encoded POSTs with bare XML responses then it should be up for a lot of things.

Answer 3

I have bought an excellent program/tutorial here :

http://www.dofactory.com/Framework/Framework.aspx

I includes a program where WCF services are consumed by WPF (as well as by Windows Forms and a ASP.NET website).

It's about design patterns basically, but using services as datasupplier is a design pattern too of course.

(for the record : I really am not advertising for this company :-))

I think this might give you plenty ideas for your own programs, and if the aim is getting to know both technologies, it would be an excellent choice.

Answer 4

I recommend that you choose an area you have no interest in, and no knowledge of. Better still, pick an area that you know you hate, and that you were never able to learn in school.

Also be sure to choose a project too large for a single person to ever complete alone, and which requires equipment you do not own and cannot afford.

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Once you invert the above, I think you may find a good start.

Answer 5

A project I was thinking about was to help regulate my teenage son's internet usage.

Windows has a UI-based tool to control logon times. A WPF front-end would be nice to duplicate or improve on that tool, but use it to set network usage times. This way, kids could do school work (not prohibited from logging on their computer) but not be distracted by facebook.

The WCF portion would be a WCF service on your computer and WCF client on the kids' computers. The kids' computers would periodically check for restriction updates. If network access is current OFF, then the client (on the kids' computer) would turn off the network adapters (both ethernet and Wifi), turn them on every few minutes to check for updates, then turn them off again.

Just define a data contract for whatever structure/class you want to represent usage, and the service would have an operation contract with a single call, like:

[ServiceContract]
interface INetworkControl
{
    [OperationContract]
    NetworkRestriction GetNetworkRestriction();
}

Maybe it would need more; that would be up to you (i.e., pass the computer name as a parameter, or perhaps logged on user if you wanted to control by user, who knows).