Yesterday I piloted the WPF workshop I've set up for my compangy, Sogeti, together with Dennis Olsthoorn, one of my colleagues. I had planned for the seven students to actually get their feet wet in WPF by letting them do some of the excellent HOLs Microsoft supplies, but unfortunately, the software-gods had other plans. The virtual PC image we had prepared refused to run and my backup plan -install Visual C# Express 2008 on all machines- failed because the installer kept crashing :(
So, I ended up typing in a lot of code myself while the students were watching. Allthough there were a lot of questions and people were generally enthusiastic about WPF I still feel bad about the whole thing. Next week I hope we're able to get the software running properly!

One of the questions I got during the course was: "How can you access system specific settings, such as the current Window color?". This is easily achieved from code with:

this.Background = SystemColors.WindowBrush;

The SystemColors enum is accessible in XAML throug the x: namespace, using the x:Static markup extension:

Background="{x:Static SystemColors.WindowBrush}"

This will give the control the background-color the user has specified for his system (through Control Panel > Display -> Appearance.