About

I’m Barry, a former astrophysicist and I also know a few things about computers.  I hope to post occasionally about technical topics I find interesting (and the occasional science piece).

  • http://www.facebook.com/insanealcoholicpenguin Michael Harper

    Hi Barry,

    I’m a University student working on a final year project using Silverlight and WPF (Home Weather Station) and will be reading your articles on MVVM as design patterns are new to me; as someone looking to get into the industry as a junior C# / .NET developer do I need to worry about Metro and WinRT, or is this likely to take a few years to gain traction?

    Now I’m getting my head around it I really enjoy working with XAML and data binding!

    Many thanks

    Mike

    • http://www.lapthorn.net Barry

      Hi Mike,

      My CodeProject article (gratuitous link http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/165368/WPF-MVVM-Quick-Start-Tutorial), seems to be rather popular, so I guess that is a good point to start at (as is the CP website). There are also quite a few active WPF/XAML developers on there who are considerably more knowledgable than me (I’m a C++ developer by trade). The main XAML guys around the world frequent this newsgroup: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/wpf-disciples. You’ll find links to their own websites via the threads.

      If you’re looking at design patterns, the Gang-of-Four book (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612), is the classic text to start with. Many of the best books concerning development are language and platform agnostic (and never become outdated).

      Regarding Metro + WinRT, I don’t think anyone knows how successful they are going to be at the moment: for example, the Tiobe index this month showed Objective-C for OSX and iOS overtaking C++ and C# for the first time. However Microsoft have such a massive existing user-base (they still have 90% of the desktop market, but 10% or so of the mobile market, probably less) that learning those certainly won’t be a bad thing. On the other hand, web/mobile development using Javascript, Ruby, Python etc. is also becoming considerably more popular.

      - Barry.

  • Михаил Михайленко

    Hello Sorry for the letter. I have a question for you. You have created a project countdown-timer. How would I contact you. There are a couple of questions.