Everyone is a web guy these days. And web guys don't like WPF. That is fair enough, but I contend it is because the learning curve for 'decent WPF' is much steeper than 'decent web' pauses for heckles, and this is due to the fact that ASP.net MVC now has so much functionality supplied right out of the box - no one needs to ask 'how should I be doing X these days?' for even moderately complex applications.
Here we will look at how to get started building a truly modern application with WPF; which frameworks and packages provide us with the most bang per buck right out of the gate; and how we can deal simply and cleanly with basic, critical functionality such as data validation, command execution and messaging.
We will then wrap it all up in a neat little Visual Studio template so that we don't need to reinvent the wheel each time we go File > New > Project > WPF Application.