I've been working with WPF fairly regularly (3+ nights per week) for around 1 year now and documenting a few discoveries along the way, but I'm still on the learning curve. Maybe not a serious productivity-damaging curve like Karsten talks about (although I've been throught it), but still a curve none-the-less. This week I've been looking at the typography and document creation/editing classes like RichTextBox, FlowDocument, Figure, Floater and a plethora of others. I find it very easy to imagine a time in the future where entire books will be devoted just to FlowDocument and its children, such is the depth of the API. I'm about half-way through Petzold's “Applications = Code + Markup“ and I'm regularly finding classes that were previously completely unknown to me. This can be a little un-nerving - it seems like as soon as you start to feel comfortable with the API something new comes along that opens up new possibilities, but also makes you realize how much you still don't know. It seems this doesn't just affect regular developers - in the comments of this CodeProject article WPF program manager Rob Relyea says “I just learned last week about .You should try that out and compare. I was surprised to discover InkCanvas had done this.“ The comment is dated from the start of this month. If program managers who've worked with the platform since it's inception are continuing to discover cool things, you can bet there are plenty of happy discoveries and “aHa“ moments to come for those prepared to make the effort.

All this is not just idle IL speilunking - I'm working on a WPF “content creation” application in my spare time that I'm hoping to release a beta for soon, with a final release in the “Vista timeframe” (and that nolonger means “some time in the far future” either like it once did). It's no Max or NewYork Times Reader, but it aint notepad either.