When .NET first appeared it brought with it, among other things, Windows Forms: a library of classes for building Windows applications. Although it worked well enough, it was built on a foundation that was ten years old. We are now more than five years past that and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) finally brings a new model that contains totally new plumbing and many more powerful features.

Pro WPF in C# 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation With .NET 3.5, Second Edition is an in depth exploration of WPF for professional developers who know the .NET platform, the C# language (there is a separate Visual Basic Version of this book available as well), and the Visual Studio environment. It is 1040 pages in length and divided into 27 chapters.

The first two chapters bring an introduction to what Windows Graphics are, and the new direction that WPF has taken with DirectX and the new graphics engine. Then, you take a look at the WPF API, the evolution of WPF, and the Architecture of WPF. Next, you will learn about XAML; which is the eXtensible Application Markup Language (pronounced "zammel"), and how it works with WPF, its properties and events, and how to load and compile XAML.

Chapters 3 to 9 focus around the building blocks of your application. These include the layout, content, properties, classic controls, and the windows of your project. You will begin by seeing how an application is built, the layout process, the containers, and how they are used. Then you will work with properties and events. Next you will delve into the control class and the windows class and finally finish up with seeing how pages are put together and work with the navigation service.

Chapters 10 and 11 examine commands and resources. Commands are tasks that have been defined to connect to controls to eliminate the writing of repetitive event handling code to manage the state of your interface. Resources are effectively items that your applications need to run. They can be assembly resources such as an image or sound file, or they can be an object resource that is defined in code.

Chapters 12 to 15 cover design aspects of your application. First you will get into styles which are a collection of property values that can be applied to an element. Then you will start with simple 2D graphics that will show you how to draw basic shapes which can be assembled into more complex graphics. Next, you will extend those skills with new concepts such as modeling arcs and curves, as well as converting existing vector art into the XAML format. And finally you will work with control templates that will let you customize controls without having to build controls from scratch.