My First WPF Application

While slowly trudging through Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed, I found a (hopefully) simple application that I can practice with.

About a year ago I offered my programming services to a local coffee shop owner in order to practice my ASP.NET skills and hopefully score a lifetime supply of free coffee. Unfortunately (or in hindsight, extremely fortunately), the owner wasn't very interested in a web site.

Fast forward a year later, and the owner is interested in a tool to manage his customer credits/tabs and punch card status (i.e. number of purchases until the next one is free). This sounded like a perfect opportunity to over-engineer and practice some real-world application of WPF.

I will be creating a simple GUI app with a SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition database back-end to accomplish this goal. I want to also experiment with minimalistic UI, trying to borrow from examples from Apple and counter-examples from Microsoft. I want to try to minimize the "signal to noise ratio" of the app, if you will. I still have a lot to learn about WPF, though.