Sells is great - Insider Microsoft knowledge pays off big

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	• Programming Windows Presentation Foundation (Programming) Chris Sells, Ian Griffiths O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2005 - 447 pages average customer review:based on 51 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Nothing Short of Outstanding!

It takes a lot of "huevos" to write a book when the technology is in beta or pre-beta in this case. Obviously things are going to change a little bit before RTM, but the authors are posting updates to avoid confusion for the readers. After reading Chapter 1, I went straight into the databinding chapter and was floored. The entire book is great - almost too much to digest. As a .NET developer who spends a lot of time with markup to create ASP.NET apps, I've been dying to see markup as a way to create WinForms. I'm well versed in DHTML and the DOM, and if you're like me, you'll be very excited about WPF and XAML. After reading this book, I feel like I can hit the ground running. Buy it now!

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Sells is great - Insider Microsoft knowledge pays off big

This is the only way to really get a grip in Windows Presentation Foundation (codename Avalon). It covers all the basics, and will really give you a new framework to think in when designing the next generation user interfaces for windows. The author is a microsoft insider, and has a unique view of this new technology. With all the new tools coming available to developers and designers, its going to make the transition to those tools much simpler if you understand the general concepts of WPF, XAML, animation, objects, databinding, etc.

Note: This is not really a book for product designers, its focused squarely on a developer audience (as it says in the opening chapter), so if you dont know C# you will probably get a little lost as the book progresses. If you have some programming background, it will be a great read. I enjoyed it over the course of a week, and now that I understand all the capabilities and key concepts of this new way of thinking about UI design, I'm ready to start prototyping and demo-ing this technology to my peers to convince them of the capabilities of WPF.

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Cutting edge, well written and illustrated

All too often the first several books on a new technology are poorly written. This definitely not the case here. The book is well written and illustrated. The topics are covered clearly and with the level of depth we have come to expect from an O'Reilly walkthrough book.

This book is written in a walkthrough format. This is not an API reference. This book will take you through the API by showing code example and what those look like as displayed in the interface. That's what is needed right now, so I totally understand the style as it's used here.

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Learn To Use WPF & XAML

Wow things sure have changed since the early days of Windows programming!! The first thing that hits you as you open up '
Programming Windows Presentation Foundation' by Chris Sells and begin to learn how to program Windows for the future is how different things are compared to where they were just a few years ago when MFC was still the norm.

Gone are the confusing syntax of MFC and deciding whether to put things in the Document or View part of your application. Gone is the hard to follow API and gone are the basic graphics and simple controls that you once had!! As I went through this book I was truly astounded at how different programming in Windows will be for Vista... while daunting in HOW different this is from the past, I love that fact that Microsoft has worked to try and simplify things in that each "page" is like an application in itself. Since everything is class-based in .NET, each XAML page has its very own class associated with it that can be used to easy talk and populate the Vista page in question that you are coding.

It's quite clear that with the next generation of Windows, one of the main focus points was the graphical side of things. With WPF, there are a myriad of graphics APIs built in, and it's very easy to create shapes, animations, effects, etc. with a very simple set of code.

This is an important work, important because it is getting a taste of Avalon out to the public very early and will allow programmers to start getting familiar with it right away. The writing style is easy to follow and examples are present throughout to give the reader plenty of opportunity to see the next generation of Windows in all its glory. I was happily surprised to turn to the middle of an O'Reilly book and see COLOR pages to emphasize the kind of graphical abilities that are built in = nice touch!!

No doubt with this being a beta book that things will change as we get closer to the Vista release date, but this is a required read for anyone that will be programming on the newest generation of Windows in the future.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

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Indispensable Learning and Reference Work

Despite the fact that Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon) is beta-ware and therefore still very much a moving target, this book is invaluable for getting to grips with programming in XAML.

It systematically works its way through getting started, styling, templating and data-binding, animation and graphics and more, with worked examples & downloadable code (including updates to reflect later changes in the WPF sepcification).

It is probably the first major work on WPF, but as others emerge they will have a hard time matching it for clarity and structure. WPF is destined to be a BIG area of future Windows development and there is much more to be written on the individual aspects of the subject, but I'm willing to bet that this book (and the scheduled revised version due for the final release of WPF) will be the seminal work that others will be compared against.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9, 10, 11

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