Over the past few days I’ve been looking at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications in Visual Studio 2010. VS2010 just released a Release Candidate but I’m still using the Beta 2 version. I am primarily a data person – I enjoy working with data in memory, matrixes, arrays, and shell programs. But I’ve found that WPF really gives me the ability to write programs which have a visual component. The screenshot below shows a demo program I wrote as part of an investigation into something called Percolation. The WPF program accepts a matrix dimension (here 25), and a probability (here 0.38), and creates a 25×25 matrix of nodes where each node is connected with probability 0.38. I would not have tried this with non-WPF techniques. On the downside however, in my opinion, WPF is very poorly documented, at least on the Internet. My demo program isn’t very complicated but I had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own. But the lack of Web-based documentation is probably due to WPF relative newness. Anyway, I’m pretty excited about how WPF in VS 2010 enables data guys like me to incorporate a useful visual component to programs.