Win Your Copy - WPF In Action with Visual Studio 2008

One Minute Bottom Line

Review

Part one is used to spend a bit of time explaining this history of drawing in Windows, and as well what brought development to the point it is with regard to the need for and implementation of WPF as a technology. It also provides a brief overview of how to use WPF and why someone would want to use it.

Chapter one provides a timeline of windows drawing development. Chapter two is used to expand a bit on the formats used to develop WPF, and provides the reader with the basic 'Hello, World' type of application to provide a background on those formats. As well, it provides an introduction to using those formats within Visual Studio 2008. Chapter three explains why a user would want to use WPF. It also presents references for various tools that can be used for WPF development.

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Part two is used to delve into the basic development level components of WPF that an interested user would need to understand to be able to work with development of any types of WPF applications (whether large or small).

Chapter four introduces the various types of WPF layouts that can be used to organize the presentation of a WPF application. These layouts are the building blocks of WPF for display. Chapter five spends all of its time discussing the grid panel (a fairly new layout implementation provided in WPF). For many developers, the grid panel is likely to be the primary layout template used in a WPF application. It is expected though, that even the grid panel can be used in combination with various other layout templates.

Chapter six takes the layout template concept, and builds on top of that by providing information on components that would be used to define the display presentation in a WPF application. Resources and styles are combined into control templates and themes. Web based developers would find a lot of this information similar to the concept of CSS used across various web pages.

Chapter seven introduces the users to events in WPF, and explains the differences in event functionality between WPF, Windows Forms and various other prior windows development models. The event models built into WPF tend to be much more efficient and easily maintainable than in other forms of windows development models.

Chapter eight shifts a bit from the prior chapters and walks the user through various techniques that can be used to modify the display of controls in a WPF application. As well, it provides a very brief introduction to how events can be used to assist in the automatic update of that display.

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Part three is used to take the basic building blocks of WPF and meld them together into components that can be used to develop various applications that can be used in the real world. These applications are used in part throughout the rest of the book as examples to build upon as the reader learns more about WPF.

Chapter nine provides the first example of an application that will be constructed using WPF. It also provides the first introduction into combinations (nesting) of templates.

Chapter ten takes the initial event model defined previously and introduces the command model used across the majority of WPF application development. This model is tremendously efficient, and is a major selling point of WPF.

Chapters eleven and twelve discuss data binding in WPF, providing various examples of types of binding that can be performed. As well, they go into moderate detail about binding templates and presentation patterns that can be used to implement and manage that binding with the rest of a WPF application.

Chapter thirteen focuses on creating user specific controls, both basic and somewhat complex controls.

Chapters fourteen and fifteen discuss specific drawing concepts and the various levels of complexity that exist with regard to drawing development in WPF. They are useful in that they provide the user with various different directions that they can consider constructing drawing functionality within an application.

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Part four is used to discuss more of the wide ranging 'extensions' of what WPF can do. The chapters in this part are used as introductions and brief references for various things that can be done with WPF outside of the 'core' development aspects.

Chapters sixteen and seventeen provide some detail regarding development of navigation based applications, along with web specific implementations of WPF. Navigation applications allow the user to bring the web world into the windows world, which can be quite useful. As well, chapter seventeen takes a look at Silverlight, and how WPF development can be done using that.

Chapter eighteen details some of the aspects of printing that have been introduced in WPF. There are elements of WPF that have been tailored specifically toward the flow of documents to be printed, and the XPS format is discussed as an option for a document style.

Chapter nineteen introduces another sample application that is used to show how WPF can be tailored to provide various transitional effects throughout parts of an application in use. It provides some introductory detail about how to construct various transition elements and customize them.

Chapters twenty and twenty one discuss interoperability and threading respectively. These chapters are decent reference chapters, and a user looking through the information here will be provided a reasonable understanding of how to coordinate and interface WPF functionality with prior (and other currently used) technologies used in development. As well, the threading information reviews the WPF implementation of standard threading elements, and how they may be presented differently (and in a more efficient manner) within WPF versus in other development technologies.