The best use of time at Visual Studio Launch 2010

Question

Yes, this is a programming-related question, if a little indirectly.

For better or worse, I am switching from Winforms to WPF in April. I am also going to be in attendance at the Visual Studio Launch in Las Vegas.

I have a real need to get up to speed quickly in WPF, so my question is:
What sessions are going to be the best use of my time?

I've got some picked out already, but I'm looking for some more advice on how to wade through all the marketing fluff and get some real educational value out of these few days. I have not been to one of these events before, so I don't really know how much is marketing hype, and how much is solid content.

A couple of the workshops look interesting (VPR02 and VPS02), but I don't know enough about the actual content of these to justify the extra expense right now. Any thoughts there would be appreciated.

And yes, I do have WPF learning planned other than just these few days in Vegas, but since I'm going to be there anyway, I want to learn as much as I can in the time available.

Answer 1

Skimming the list (please note I only looked at the WPF section -- the list of all sessions was too long to read the whole thing), the ones that jump out as good for a WPF newcomer are:

• VWP02 - because it looks like it's introductory level and focused on getting productive with the tooling
• VWP03 - because it's important to think about WPF as a business app platform, not just an eye candy platform, and data visualisation is one of the killer features for that
• VWP06 - because it's explicitly introductory

Answer 2

I would highly recommend picking up a book on WPF and reading that over (if only just skim reading) before taking any courses. WPF is a pretty steep learning curve (coming from WinForms) and familiarizing yourself with WPF first will make the interactive courses that much better because you'll start with a good background and then be able to ask more advanced questions of the instructor rather than basic ones that a good book could have answered for you...

As for book recommendations, I like WPF in Action at lot, although I see you've listed VB.NET in your tags and this book's examples are written in C#.