Chapters 16 to 18 work with the handling of data. You will work the essentials of WPF data binding; that is, how to pull information out of an object and display it in a window with little or no code. Then you will see how to convert it into the representation that you need and validate it. From there you will look at working with data templates to customize the way that the data is presented, data views to present the information, and then data providers to see how to pull the information with less code. Finally you will use lists, trees, toolbars, and menus to present data in a variety of ways.

The remainder of the book concentrates on other aspects of your application including documents, printing, rich media; this includes animation, sound, and 3D graphics, interoperability, multi-threading, and deployment. One of these demonstrates that printing in WPF is much more powerful than ever before. Things that you would have had to dug into the Win32 API or WMI, such as checking a print queue, is now fully supported using the new system Printing namespace. Also, now you can add animation and 3D to make your interfaces both dynamic as well as more modern.

Pro WPF in C# 2008 is a remarkably well written and well thought out book. It covers just about all aspects of WPF and is well suited for anyone who is looking to get into WPF. Keep in mind that any mention of other technologies, such as LINQ, are just in passing; there is a very hard focus on WPF. It is current with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, and even if you owned the first edition, there may be enough changes to make it worth the upgrade so you would want to check it out.

While there is everything to like about Pro WPF in C# 2008, I especially like the flow throughout the book. For the complete WPF beginner, it will guide you from beginning to end. For the more experienced Windows Forms developer, it will let you cherry pick what you need and leave the rest for later. And for all, it will provide a good reference book for the future. If you don't own Pro WPF in C# 2008 and want to get into Windows Presentation Foundation then I very highly recommend this book.