Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a replacement for the diverse presentation technologies that have been developed over the course of the last 15 years. It is an attempt to unify into a state of the art platform, a foundation by which you can build dynamic applications that take advantage of all of the latest technologies. It fully integrates the best of Windows and the Web including interfaces, documents, and media, all while leveraging the power of XML.

While the author of Essential Windows Presentation Foundation knew there would be a lot of books coming out on WPF, he wanted his to offer something that was unique. Since Chris Anderson worked on the WPF design team, his perspective would, by default, be unique in and of itself, but his goal was to have a book designed for application developers and intended as a conceptual reference book covering most of WPF. Essential Windows Presentation Foundation is about application software; that is, software that is designed to communicate with people, not other software. It is 512 pages in length and divided into eight chapters.

Chapter 1, "Introduction," presents the platform and breaks down how the seven major components of WPF fit together. It is here also where you will see a quick start of how to build applications as well where to find content in the documentation and how to use the SDK.

Chapter 2, "Applications," will explain the structure of applications built using WPF as well as the application services and top-level objects used by applications. Here you will look at the Application object and the main components that make up an application. You will also see how to manage state throughout any kind of application.

Chapter 3, "Controls," explores the major design patterns in WPF controls and the major control families in WPF. Since controls are the fundamental building blocks of user interfaces, this may be the most important chapter in the book. In this chapter you will examine the three main principles that lie within all controls: element composition, rich content everywhere, as well as a simple programming model.

Chapter 4, "Layout," describes the design of the layout system and an overview of the six stock layout panels that ship in WPF. While controls are the basis of an application, it is the layout that plays a critical role in positioning and sizing those controls.

Chapter 5, "Visuals," gives an overview of the surface area that is the WPF visual system. In the last two chapters, the roles that controls and layouts played were examined. Now you will learn how to use them to create a set of visuals that display pixels on a screen. This will now take you down the road from typography, 2D and 3D graphics, animation, video, and audio.