WPF 4.5 Unleashed

I do not have any previous experience with WPF, so it's a good starting point for me.

I am not sure what happened, but I have downloaded this onto multiple devices and now the text has become unreadable. Many words are replaced with symbols. I would avoid the Kindle version of this book.

Probably the most important thing you and I look for in these reviews is "Who is this book written for?". The answer here is someone who already knows a good deal of C# programming that wants to become an expert at WPF. If you want a start-from-zero book on how to create user interfaces this is not it. But if you know C# and you want to learn WPF in the context of how it interacts with C code as well as with hardware, this is the book for you. The more you know about programming in general, the more this book will help you.It's hard to quantify what is meant by "expert" and "the more you know . . . " but if you don't know what inheritance is or what "instanciate" means, you might not get as much out of it. If you know C# and you want to get about as deep into WPF as you can go, this book will take you there. The first three chapters set the stage by giving extensive details on the background, philosophy and operation of WPF. There is even some history thrown in, and the author is in a position to know it! I read those three but started on Chapt 4 where the WPF building really begins.I can give you some advice as to the path to follow if you're not already a C# expert. I certainly wasn't when I was searching for a book like this but I was a competent programmer. I started with John Sharp's excellent book "Visual C# 2010", beginning on p. 443 he takes you through your first WPF interface in great detail for about 100 pages. After I finished his tutorial, I had no trouble going to "WPF 4.5 Unleashed" and starting on Chapt 4 where Mr. Nathan begins getting into WPF deeply. Between the two I learned a lot of both interface and programming skills. I would not have been able to just jump into "Unleashed" because I didn't quite have the programming skills. You might be in better or worse shape to start.From what I now know about WPF, there isn't much that it can do that this book doesn't at least touch on. It was a great teaching tool for me and serves now as a reference book when I need to try something advanced.The writing is succinct and clear. The color graphics and type are VERY helpful and greatly aids following along on your computer, particularly if you Visual Studio.It's a very good book and I'm glad I bought it.

This book will not teach you how to write desktop applications. Rather, it assumes you already have experience doing so, but want to learn how to do it with WPF. For example, it will tell you all sorts of interesting things about using a ListView control in WPF, but doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what it is or why you'd want to use it vs. other options.There's a general bottom-up mentality that pervades the structure of the book. For example, there's a chapter for "Content Controls", followed by a chapter for "Items Controls". The chapter titles and their contents come from the base classes that the controls inherit from. Whereas other books might organize things by complexity or purpose, WPF Unleashed organizes them by class hierarchy.Sometimes useful information is hard to find. For example, if you want to know how to create a modal dialog, you'd probably look up "modal dialog" in the index. This would take you to a section on popping up Win32 or WinForms dialogs from within a WPF application. The actual discussion of modal dialogs is in a small sub-section entitled, "Custom Dialogs". Fortunately these occurrences are rare.On the plus side, the book covers a tremendous amount of ground, and does a pretty good job of explaining some very complicated topics. (Properties, dependency properties, attached properties, attached property providers, property triggers, property wrappers, property paths, ...)The paperback version is printed in full color, on relatively thin paper. On pages with heavy color areas, like the start of each chapter, the paper tends to curl. Not really a problem, just odd.

This book is a prime example of how a WPF book should be written. The author not only presents many topics in an encyclopedic fashion, but also gives details for the "whys." Also, the diagrams in the book are phenomenal in helping to illustrate the examples and descriptions presented in the text. The book has both a lot of breadth and a lot of depth as well. One can choose to read this book "superficially," ignoring the details. However, for those of us who are interested in the whys as well as the hows, this book presents much more depth than I would expect from a WPF (or any software development) book.As for the rating, I give the content 6 out of 5 stars. On the other hand, I give the publisher (Sams) 2 out of 5 stars. The reason for this is that the pages are ridiculously thin, so you get bleed-through between the two sides of a page, especially in the many densely colored regions that are present in the illustrations in this book. Also, the CMY color plates that are used to add color to the book were often off, resulting in imprecise positioning of colors which is especially noticeable on thin lines and colored text. On top of all of this, two physical pages in my particular book had slight creases in the paper, which resulted in significant misprints on those pages. Fortunately, the resultant printed pages were still legible, so I did not bother to return the book to Amazon or the publisher for a replacement.In all, because of the quality of the actual content, I do not want to subtract a star or two from the book's rating. However, I think that Sams _really_ needs to do a much better job of printing color books such as this one. Skimping on paper thickness and not aligning the color plates properly is reminiscent of printing errors from the early 80s, not late 2013.

I am still only about 80% of the way through this book and it covers a huge amount of ground. I particularly like the way Adam Nathan describes the odd-ball things regarding WPF 4.5 - things that could have been done differently or that don't make a lot of sense. Those are the things which trap beginners and cost them a lot of time if they haven't been warned.

SURPRISINGLY I FOUND NOTHING ABOUT BLEND OR ITS USE IN VISUAL STUDIO AND THE EXAMPLES SEEM SOMEWHAT USELESS TO ME BUT THERE WERE LOTS OF WORDS AND A FEW PICTURES FOR YOU ENJOY.

love it!

This is a good book, as long as you're aware of what it's trying to do.Reading this book will teach you a lot about the WPF framework, but it won't (alone) teach you how to build a WPF application - that's a completely different goal. A WPF application is a Windows GUI application that uses WPF, and also probably XAML, and either C++/Win32 or .NET or both.This book *only* covers the WPF class libraries and runtime model, and as such is not sufficient as a guide to develop a whole Windows GUI application. Even XAML, which many people view as interchangeable with WPF but is in fact a separate technology, is not covered in any great depth by this book. The same author has a  another 500 page book  dedicated to XAML.Other books like  Programming WPF: Building Windows UI with Windows Presentation Foundation  take a more "batteries included" approach and aim to be all you need to build a whole WPF application, but gloss over details and leave you without a full understanding of what is happening under the hood.If you're looking for the best book on WPF, and are happy that this will only be part of your library on Windows GUI application development, this is the book you're looking for. another 500 page bookProgramming WPF: Building Windows UI with Windows Presentation Foundation

A very good book. It covers a lot of information, and is clear and readable. It is suitable for experienced .Net programmers. I'm not sure it would suit the novice. The only criticisms I have are the paper quality - the pages are very thin and more like toilet paper - and the example code which is full of bugs - I found one bug in each example. In each case it was missing code, rather than incorrect code, and in my case I found it quite a good reader exercise. I was using the free version of Visual Studio 2015 and Windows 10.