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Pro WPF in C# 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5, Second Edition (Books for Professionals by Professionals)
By Matthew MacDonald ( Apress )
Release Date: 2008-02-25
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List Price: $54.99
Price: $34.64
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Product Description

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation provides the foundation for building applications and high–quality user experiences in Windows Vista. WPF blends application user interface, documents, and media content to provide richer control, design, and development of the visual aspects of Windows programs.

Author Matthew MacDonald shows you how WPF really works. His no–nonsense, practical advice will get you building high–quality WPF applications quickly and easily. MacDonald will take you through a thorough investigation of the more advanced aspects of WPF, and its relation to other elements of the WinFX stack and the .NET Framework 3.5, to complete your understanding of WPF and C# 2008.

WPFs functionality extends to support for Tablet PCs and other forms of input device, and provides a more modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility and UI automation infrastructure, data–driven UI and visualization, as well as the integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell.

What you’ll learn

  • WPF basics: XAML, layout, control essentials, and data flow
  • WPF applications: Navigation, commands, localization, and deployment
  • Advanced controls: Custom controls, menus, toolbars, and trees
  • WPF documents: Text layout, printing, and document packaging
  • Graphics and multimedia: Drawing shapes, sound and video, animation, geometric transformations, and imaging

Who is this book for?

Developers encountering WPF and .NET 3.5 for the first time in their professional lives

About the Apress Pro Series

The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard–won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.


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Product Reviews:
  A must have for serious WPF users 
What makes developers who migrate from WinForms, MFC, etc. excited on WPF is the plenty of paths that goes to the customization of built-in/user-defined controls.

This book covers all aspects of control customization clearer than any other online article, or book on WPF that I've read.

It's initially my primary source of information on WPF, as it has a broad coverage of topics with a well defined scope.
  Very helpful 
So far, I've found Pro WPF to be a decent reference and a very good overview of WPF. I was particularly interested in the chapter on text layout, which was good but not great. I would have appreciated it if that chapter was a little more in depth, but it's still the best treatment of fixed and flow documents that I have found.
  Excellent reference but can be difficult to wade through at times ( ev_yp )
This is the book to get if you want expert guidance on, say, how to leverage WPF features to give your user interface controls a different look and feel because the author provides plenty of substantive examples and even covers some features not documented well elsewhere. If you're looking, however, for guidance of the more "architectural" kind such as what WPF facilities and techniques will help you implement modern day variants of the Model View Controller design pattern such as MVP or MVVM, you will not find it in this book. Also, this is probably not a book that you can (or will) read from cover to cover in a few sittings because some of the scenarios covered may not be applicable to you right away in that they're fairly advanced or don't occur frequently, so be forewarned: this book can be difficult to wade through at times. But overall, an excellent reference!
  Saved Me Many Many Times ( ancienthuman )
I love the Petzold book Applications = Code + Markup, but it covers a subset of WPF and is out of date now. Pro WPF in C# 2008 is up-to-date, covers a much larger subset, and doesn't shy away from the hard stuff. Almost every time I turn to this book, I find either an answer or a new pointer that leads to the answer on-line. Yesterday, I found a method called TemplatedParent that is ill-covered in my other books. Today, I found IScrollInfo. Highly recommended as a well-written, comprehensive, up-to-date WPF reference for intermediate to advanced developers. For starting out, I still recommend the Petzold book, which really tries hard to build understanding.
  I wish i could give it 4 star, but... ( billwangsyd )
I generally like Matthew's writing, but this one really fell short of my expectations, esp considering it's a 2nd edition (I've never read the first edition, though).

Pros:
- it gave a good overview of what WPF is all about(the underlying DirectX etc), and why we need yet another Windows GUI technology.

Cons:
- it lacks substance, each chapter mostly contains a shallow description of a "feature" of WPF, with some code snippets. The content feels more like a showoff of what WPF can do + some tips & tricks.

- there is no central theme in the book, ie. the author doesn't hold your hand and build a non-trivial app using the key features of WPF. So at the end of the book, i'm still at a loss as to how to re-write some of my Windows Forms apps in WPF.

- it's completely focused on the WPF technology, with hardly any information on the fundamentals of Computer Graphics theory and how it's related to WPF. I guess for most folks who just want to cobble togther a form with a few data bound controls in it, this prob isn't a problem. But to create commercial apps in WPF, this book is just not enough.