It was a great learning experience.  I learned a lot.  First, I learned that when you apply head knowledge, sometimes there are some gaps that you never knew were there.  I had to spend some time filling in the holes, to convert stuff I thought I knew into something I could actually use.  

I also learned what a pain it is to develop WPF programs without Visual Studio.  I spent hours trying to manually build and compile a project file, only to fail.  I finally gave up and installed Visual Studio Express.  Within an hour, I had all those problems solved, and had all the options at my fingertips.  This leads to the next thing I discovered.

I found out how easy it is to develop applications using Visual Studio.  To tell the truth, it's pretty much cheating.  It's a matter of going down the list and selecting the stuff you want, kind of like shopping at a grocery store.  It was quite a different feeling than what I'm used to - thinking up all the code in my head, before typing it out.  While this means that I can start developing in WPF pretty quickly, it also hinders my getting the language down, which usually requires doing things the hard way.  I became proficient with Java, PHP, Javascript, HTML, and CSS by doing it the hard way, with a program that was little more than notepad.

Well, that's about it.  You can try my program out.  It's on the panel to the right, under Features.  I'm trying out the new deployment method Microsoft has, where you launch the program online.  There's no installation, and no system files get changed or added to your computer.