Love it
Much like the old [...] Tips and Tricks book, this book gave me recepies for doing specific things.
It gets me over a lot of hurdles.
(I need to reread the contents section again every now and again so that I remember that there is solutions to these problems.)
Very practical.
This book rocks!
This book has what is very hard to find with such new material as WPF... good working examples. I truely believe the the chapter on user and owner controls more than pays for the book, although the book offers much more.
Apress rates this book Beginner-Intermediate. For me, I don't think I could have understood this book 6 months ago, but after working with WPF for about a year now I find it extremely easy to read and very informative.
I found direct answers to problems that I have had over my last 6 week project, and know that if this book was out last month I could have cut 2 weeks out of that project with ease.
Back to user controls (again, this is not the only good about the book... it just what I'm focusing on right now). The chapter offers not only good examples, but insight from the authors on how to make your new control work well with others that would want to restyle it. Another section shows you how to know if your in delevopment mode so as to change it's look when in Blend if required. All in all a pretty thourgh coverage.
One thing I'd like to say, as I think this might bug some people. There is a fair amount of duplicate code in the book, as there are times that the same code really does express more than one idea, and can be reused in other sections (or even the same section at times.)
I actually agree with the author's desision to duplicate the code instead of referencing me to other sections in the book. I can keep my train of thought where it should be, and don't have to keep flipping back a few chapters as in some other books. Even with the dupicate code, there are other functions added if appropriate.
Of the examples I have read, I find them to be concise, and to accurately portray the idea the authors are describing. They do not attempt to be more than they need to be, but are strong enough to cover more than the bare minimium.
Congratulations on a job well done.
Very well written, organized, and comprehensive
This very well written and organized book provides comprehensive coverage of WPF features. The authors get down to business right away, assuming that most readers already know basic WPF concepts such as Dependency Property, Attached Property, etc. because they don't waste time explaining many such building block concepts, and yet a few of the recipes are surprisingly beginner-ish material. Of the 200+ recipes, the ones that I thought gave me the most bang for my buck are those contained in Chapters 11 (Creating Animation), 7 (Working With Text, Documents, and Printing), 4 (Creating User and Custom Controls) and 5 (Data Binding), either because they covered materials not found many where else, or they clarified some concepts for me. For example, the Animation Recipes discussed concepts not even covered in the very well-received "Practical WPF Graphics Programming" book by Jack Xu. The recipes in Chapters 6 (Working With Styles, Templates, Skins and Themes), 8 (Multithreading), and 10 are good, and the remaining recipes in Chapters 1 (Building and Debugging WPF Applications), 2 (Working With Windows, Forms, and Layout Management), 3 (Using Standard Controls), 9 (Working With 2D Graphics), 12 (Dealing With Multimedia and User Input) and 13 (Migrating and Windows Forms Interoperability) cover materials easily found in other books. Another positive, however, is that some chapters contain bonus nuggets of information on things you can do to make your code play nicer with designer tools like Expression Blend. Overall, I think the authors did a great job!
(3 reviews)
