Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

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.

Average Customer Rating:

Great reference for WPF

Customer Rating:

This is a great reference for WPF--I've been looking for a book like this for quite a while. It's probably not the best learning resource, but once you have a general understanding of WPF, this book can help dig deeper into specific topics, like "How do I change the startup behavior of a WPF apoplication? Can I put my UI files into a DLL, so I can swap the UI?" Chapter 3 helps answer both questions. No hesitation recommending this book to intermediate-level WPF developers.

Very thorough, but not clear for learners

Customer Rating:

This is certainly a thorough book, at 1000 pages highly suitable for thumping down on tables in order to impress people with the kinds of arcane stuff you get into. There are an awful lot of gotchas in WPF for the newbie, and one of the strengths of this book is that it has lots of detail about these unexpected behavioral quirks that would otherwise have you tearing your hair out and swearing at your innocent monitor. However, as a learning tool for someone who knows nothing about WPF - surely most of its likely readership - it isn't the clearest or easiest read. Compare it to a truly excellent technical book like my all-time favorite Albahari's "C# in a Nutshell": Albahari starts with simple topics, clearly explained, and gradually progresses to the more difficult and obscure. Macdonald starts his explanation of Dependency Properties with how you create your own ones in .NET: a complicated operation which I for one had no interest in at that point, since I didn't even get what they were yet! Same story with Control Templates: we get the whole stuff about visual trees before we get to see a simple example. Most of the time, we developers try to start by *doing* something with the technology, before we worry too much about the arcana of how it all hangs together under the hood. More grievously though, Macdonald doesn't actually explain how one's newly created control template is applied to an actual control. I guess one is assumed to be able to work out something so obvious for oneself! All his examples show control template markup, but nothing about how they get applied to the control they are templating. Sure, it's easy once you know, and you can see how it's done in the downloadable code for the book, but something so fundamental should be explained in the text, and right at the start. I don't know if the better-known Applications=Markup+Code does a better job as a tutorial, so I can't tell you to buy something else, but to be honest I'm sort of wishing I had.

Great book! Better than WPF Unleashed!!

Customer Rating:

I ordered this book and WPF Unleashed (Adam Nathan) at the same time. I read WPF Unleashed first because I saw the reviews on Amazon.com. Then I read this title, Pro WPF in C# 2008. I found this to be a much better book than WPF Unleashed. It's thicker, has more content, and dives much deeper. Don't get me wrong, they are both excellent books and I recommend them both. But if you really want to understand core WPF concepts, this book is the better choice.

Very nice	Customer Rating:
Really a very nice introduction to WPF, it includes all the details to include win32 controls in WPF windows and WPF controls in WinForms app. I definitaly recommend this book!

Best technical book I've read in a while

Customer Rating:

This book is laid out in a clear, straight-forward way. The chapters, and content within each, flow well. There is so much to learn with WPF, evidenced by the size of this book, that it can be daunting. However, Matthew takes a pragmatic, step-by-step approach which makes it very digestible. On numerous occasions I've found myself learning something in a paragraph but coming up with questions, only to find answers to those exact questions in the following paragraphs. I just searched and see that the author is writing a Silverlight 2 book. Sign me up!