I'm not necessarily tied to Desktop, and there's a part of me that kind of likes the idea of being able to access the information from various devices or even collaboratively with others. But I have no idea how to do any of that, aside from making it web-based, and I don't really enjoy making web front-end stuff, or back-end server stuff for that matter. I suppose I could just write it in Unity, which I'm familiar enough with the UI system and it has built-in cross-platform build support. But it seemed like a waste of computing resources to use a 3D game engine to run what is (or should be) a simple, lightweight GUI application. So I'll be happy to settle for a "portable" desktop app I can run and maybe sync via Dropbox if I need to access it across devices or share it with others. Hence my foray into WPF. If I get really serious about the idea of running it on mobile devices at some future time, then maybe I'll try porting the code back into Unity or come up with some other plan. I'll cross that bridge when/if I ever get that far.
So, thanks for the links, wraith808! I'll start looking through them.
In the meantime, here are some other resources I've looked at, in case it helps others who may come across this thread in the future.
At the beginning of this year, I wanted to clean up
a GUI app I had hacked together for (NANY 2018) using the visual editor when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, so I searched for some tutorial videos on YouTube and came across
Tim Corey's channel. I watched a few of his videos, including:
Intro to WPF: Learn the basics and best practices of WPF for C#I found the above video to be a good primer on WPF. It, too, recommended typing in the XAML manually rather than using the visual editor. After I finished that one, I wanted to learn more and the next suggested video from his channel was:
WPF in C# with MVVM using Caliburn MicroI don't think I finished watching all of the above video, mostly because I was such a noob a lot of it was going over my head, and it seemed like a lot of time and effort to learn about MVVM when all I really wanted at the time was to fix a few relatively minor issues with my hacked together GUI on my older program.
With both of those videos being over an hour long, I was afraid of asking for more video tutorials here because I didn't like the idea of spending 40-60 hours watching a video course/tutorial to learn. But I thought that perhaps other tutorial videos could exist that didn't require such a time commitment or at least divided up the content into relatively more bite-sized chunks. So today I did another search looking for comprehensive, but short(er) videos. What I found appears to reinforce my initial suspicion that video tutorials will require a fairly significant time investment. For example, I found
this 45-video playlist by AngelSix on YouTube, where each video appears to be approximately 1 hour long on average.
WPF UI ProgrammingI did watch that first video in the series and it also recommended writing the XAML manually for similar reasons. Video #3 in the playlist will cover some MVVM basics as well, so that means three out of three sources so far have recommended writing XAML directly and using MVVM.