So here's a preview of my little test application that may one day become "Comicster 2.0". What I'm doing is recreating Comicster using Windows Presentation Foundation, but truly from the ground up. Comicster, as you know, was original a way for me to learn .NET 2.0 while at the same time producing something valuable to me. This will be no different - a way to learn .NET 3.0 while producing a new and improved version of Comicster.

Click on the screenshot to embiggen!

Comicster WPF Screenshot

What you see here is a simple application showing a dummy collection. You'll notice that I've taken the "issues" out of the tree altogether, and instead I'm showing them in a list next to the tree. What this allows me to do is a sort of "auto search" for issues. As you can see in the screenshot, I actually have the "Owned" folder selected, and it's showing me every issue I own - regardless of which title or trade they belong to.

 You can also see that underneath the tree I have a series of "tabs". These represent the other elements of your collection - publishers, characters etc. The idea here is that you could switch to the "Characters" tab, click on "Spder-Man" and immediately the list of issues would change to show you all the issues that Spider-Man appears in.

This is all a long way off, but you can see what I'm trying to achieve.

There are going to be a few hurdles along the way as I learn WPF. For example, I will have to change where the "issues" list gets its list of issues from depending on which tab you have selected on the left. And the pane on the right which would show a skinned view of the details for the selected item will have to show the details for either the selected item in the tree or the selected issue in the list, depending on which you clicked on last. I'm sure these are edge cases in WPF so they may not be easy, but what's life without a few challenges?

Have you had experience with WPF (cough Paul Stovell, I know you're reading cough)? Leave me a comment with some ideas of what to post about as I stumble my way through this project!