Steps to Learn ATF

Table of Contents ATF Programmer's Guide Samples DOM Reference Learn About Framework Development Programming Guidelines

After reading ATF Getting Started, follow these steps to learn more about ATF. These steps are in a suggested order; you may find it useful to go through them differently, going forward and backward as needed to get the information you need to proceed further.

ATF Programmer's Guide

Study the topics in the ATF Programmer's Guide to learn the basics of programming with ATF. You probably need to read some of this guide to understand the ATF Code Samples Discussions.

Samples

Look at the ATF Code Samples and their technologies used. Build samples that interest you and run them, as described in Installing and Building ATF. Try out Creating an Application from an ATF Sample. For a deeper look, read about the samples' programming in ATF Code Samples Discussions.

Examine the sample's source, starting with the Program.cs file. In the Main() function, note how components are added to the MEF TypeCatalog. Take a look at some of the components' code. Read code of interest in the samples, especially if it does something similar to what you want to do with ATF.

DOM

If you are going to use a DOM, read DOM in a Nutshell. For more details, see the ATF Programmer's Guide: Document Object Model (DOM), downloadable from ATF Documentation.

Reference

If there are ATF terms unfamiliar to you, look them up in the ATF Glossary. See the ATF Reference for other reference material, such as the API Reference. You might want to scan the Class Survey of representative and useful ATF classes to find classes useful for your project.

Learn About Framework Development

The following books contain lots of useful information about developing frameworks, and ATF development follows the guidelines they suggest. It is especially useful to follow these guidelines in components you write, because these are essentially extending ATF and .NET.

• Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition) by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. This is an excellent book whose guidelines ATF follows in developing a reusable extensible framework. MSDN has much of the book's content as well as the naming guidelines.
• Programming C# 5.0, Building Windows 8, Web, and Desktop Applications for the .NET 4.5 Framework by Ian Griffiths, O'Reilly Media.

Programming Guidelines

ATF has followed design guidelines to provide a unified programming model with .NET to enhance developer productivity. For more details on this, see Learn About Framework Development.

If you are a Sony employee who is a member of SCE with a SHIP account, read the ATF Programming Guidelines to learn the programming and code style guidelines followed by the Authoring Tools Framework team. Even though you are not developing ATF itself, these are useful development guidelines.