Illustrated WPF [Paperback]

Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsoft's API for creating Windows applications. It gives the programmer the ability to produce dazzling, graphicsrich programs easily without having to delve into the messy details of the graphics subsystem.

To use this power, however, the programmer must learn new concepts for laying out pages and displaying graphics. Illustrated WPF presents these concepts clearly and visuallymaking them easier to understand and retain.

To use Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsofts newest API for creating Windows applications, users must learn new concepts for design and implementation. This book presents those concepts clearly, using simple diagrams to illustrate them.

With WPF, Microsoft started from scratch and built a UI framework that is more logical, powerful, and integrated than previous frameworks. But its different from previous frameworks, and you need to understand its structure and paradigms to use it effectively. One of the reasons WPF has a reputation of having a steep and extensive learning curve is that we, as programmers, think that all UI frameworks are pretty much the same, just with different API classes, methods, and parameters. In the case of WPF, however, this definitely is not case. The result is that when programmers just jump from another framework to WPF without learning the basics, theyre frustrated that everything seems so different. The purpose of this book is to teach you the fundamentals and mechanics of WPF programming as quickly and simply as possible, while giving you a firm grasp of whats actually going on under the covers. To do this, Ive used a combination of text, figures, bulleted lists, and tables. Many of us think visually. To us, figures, bulleted lists, and tables help clarify and crystallize our understanding of a concept by cutting through the clutter of pages of dense paragraphs of explanation. My experience wasló,