WinForm - WPF integration; Piece by Piece

Question

I have a medium sized WinForm App (1 Form that hosts 40 user controls) that we use in house. I want to migrate over to WPF but I cannot do a Mass ReRelease.

My idea was, for now, to recreate the App 1 User Control at a time in WPF and have that hosted in the existing WinForm App. I would make them look nearly identical, at this point, so there would be no need for mass retraining.

My question is more to the point of, has any one else tried this and how does the data portion work.

I have recreated one of the WinForms User Controls as a WPF user Control. Do I need to publish that as a User Control Library?

How, then, would I access the DAL for that UC? I use a Linq to Sql data layer.

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To clarify, user controls for me are a "Page", so Demographics is a user control.

Also, my DAL is a separate library. Would I want that in my WPF solution as well and then set up the data binding there and when I import it into the winform app it will come with it or it will just be able to find it at that same location...

Answer 1

I am in the middle of a migration from a Win Form version to a WPF version of a program at the moment. I am using pretty standard controls, so there is not a whole lot of user control programming needed. I am finding it pretty easy. My back end is some ORM mapping from SQL2008, and it is pretty easy to work out.

WPF does have a bit of a different databinding technique, though, so you might have to spend some time looking at MSDn figuring out the CollectionView classes and whatnot.

as far as your user controls are concerned, are the controls accessing your Data driectly? Or are they instead accessing data through an intermediate interface?

Previously, my only user controls have been pretty simple (masked textbox, numeric up/down etc). These were all hosted in a control library. For what you are talking about, I would assume that importing your DAL reference, would still work. Otherwise I am unsure of what might be the problem.

Cory