This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

WPF Control Development Unleashed

Building Advanced User Experiences

In this book, two leading Windows Presentation Foundation experts give developers everything they need to build next-generation WPF applications–software that is more robust, usable, and compelling.

Drawing on their close ties with Microsoft’s WPF development team, Pavan Podila and Kevin Hoffman give you a clear, robust, and practical understanding of WPF, its underpinnings, its overall architecture, and its design philosophy. Podila and Hoffman introduce never-before-published WPF design patterns and support them with robust, real-world code examples–all presented in full color, just as they appear in Visual Studio.

The authors begin by explaining how to “think in WPF,” and then introduce powerful new techniques for everything from handling 3D layouts to creating game-like physics effects. Along the way, they offer in-depth coverage of data binding, building interactivity, and control development: three of WPF’s most challenging concepts. You’ll learn how to choose the right WPF features for every programming challenge, and use those features far more creatively and effectively.

If you want to build truly outstanding WPF applications, this is the book that will get you there.

• Master the patterns and techniques you need to build state-of-the-art WPF applications

• Write more powerful and effective applications that reflect a deep understanding of WPF’s design philosophy

• Learn how WPF has evolved, and take full advantage of its growing sophistication

• Make the most of advanced declarative programming techniques

• Leverage IScrollInfo, virtualization, control theming, and other complex features

• Build more powerful interactivity into your WPF applications

• Create more visual software with 3D elements, custom animations, and shader effects

• Optimize WPF application performance in real-world environments

• Master design patterns for organizing your controls more effectively

Category: .NET Programming / WPF

Covers: Windows Presentation Foundation

User Level: Intermediate—Advanced

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Great book if you already know everything in it - 2009-10-13
Reviewer Rating:
This book consistently make promises its fails to keep. Chapter after chapter starts with "in the chapter you will gain an in-depth knowledge of X" and after several pages of very high-level discussion and nearly irrelevant examples concludes with, "Now that you know all about X..." and the authors barely even grazed the topic - then alone provided you with anything you can actually use to implement the topics supposedly covered.

Case in point: Data Templates. They spent the first four chapters raving about them and talking about how they have shown you the power of them and did not provide a single explanation of how to actually use one, or where they are used. No examples or even discussions of concrete examples at all. So when I read "now we have shown you..." and they have not shown me anything at all - well, I'm done. I admit I only made it half-way before I was so disgusted I put it down and quit wasting my time. Chapter after chapter I finished wondering where was the beef?

I'm no WPF beginner, but then I'm no expert either - that is why I am reading the book, right? I am sure if you are reading this stuff already knowing everything it makes more sense - but I found myself thinking as I read about topics I already know, "Man, that is a convoluted way to describe that to someone just learning. I'm sure glad I already know it." It was positively inspiring in the sense that I began thinking if these guys can write a book this bad and get published, maybe I should take a shot at writing a book myself.

Seriously, the entire book needs a reality check - the best is when they claim to be presenting a simpler method of accomplishing some task and then proceed to unfold something grotesque. At least other authors I have read covering WPF have the common decency to show you how to do a thing that is ugly, acknowledge that, yes, it is ugly, shrug and move on - or better yet show you a better pattern, but this book reads like Microsoft sales literature. But then who are you going to believe, the experts or your own lying eyes? I don't know how much of this is the technology and how much is the authors, but sorry, you can point at a bowl of spaghetti and call it a twelve-layer lasagna all you want; I am not buying it.

Excellent book for the experienced - 2009-10-30
Reviewer Rating:
If you have experience with WPF this is an excellent book. It may not have all the detailed code but has all the meaty topics you need. If it had code for every little thing it talks about it would probably be a 900-page book and much less appealing. This is a 350-page book but very dense. Every page has tons of useful information.
It's a nice complement to Adam Nathan's book (ISBN 0672628917).

Much Needed Book on Building WPF Controls - 2010-01-06
Reviewer Rating:
I've been writing apps for business and pleasure in WPF for 2.5 years now. I own every significant book on WPF that is out there. Most are quite good, and can do a nice job showing Joe Developer how to build an app in WPF by teaching about the out-of-the-box controls, basic data binding, validation, DataTemplates, ControlTemplates, Styles, Triggers, etc. That sort of book can get you building an app that looks very nice and leaves its WinForms battleship gray apps in the dust.

However, actually building custom controls in WPF is a topic that is barely glanced upon in most of those books. Furthermore, there simply wasn't much information specifically on the topic of building your own WPF controls on MSDN. The best sources where blogs such as Josh Smith, Dr WPF, and Pavan Podila (one of the authors). But a book that systematically covered the topic was a void that has been very nicely filled by WPF Control Development Unleashed. This is great because well-done custom controls can really increase the "sizzle" of an app and make it enjoyable to use.

As others have written, this book isn't for someone who is just learning WPF. It is for some advanced developers who are building their own WPF controls. On the first page the authors explain that they are going to teach the "whys" of WPF so that compelling apps can be built, and that they are also maintainable and can stand the test of time because they are built in accordance with the WPF design philosophy. I think the book does a great job of achieving that goal.

One of the biggest strengths of the book is that it spends time showing when NOT to build a custom WPF control in favor of re-templating existing controls. They creatively give a number of examples of this, including using a WPF ListBox to actually display an animated radar screen! Re-purposing existing controls through their ControlTemplates should always be explored before actually building a new custom WPF Control. They also cover the WPF class hierarchy and explain that when building a custom WPF control it is very important to subclass from the correct WPF class.

My favorite chapters were "Building Custom Panels", "Using Existing Controls", "Advanced Scrolling", "Virtualization", "Custom Animations", "Events, Commands, and Focus", and "Advanced Data Binding". These chapters delve into the plumbing of WPF in ways other books don't. Unless you are a WPF rockstar you will learn lots of new things about these topics. Maybe you'll learn about the levels of data binding precedence, or how you can receive change notification for dependency properties that a control doesn't provide an event for, new ways to use Attached Properties--or maybe just some guidelines over when to use Commands or RoutedEvents. You will learn something you didn't know before, even about WPF topics you have used extensively.

Is this book perfect? No, of course not. It simply cannot cover everything about WPF in full detail. For instance, you will find some discussion of WPF design patterns (MVVM, etc) but as these are not the main focus of the book there wasn't room to cover them (and all their flavors). In fact I really think there would be room for a book entirely devoted to WPF flavors of UI design patterns. Despite a few minor shortcomings along these lines, I feel this book merits 5 stars.

The authors' examples of custom WPF controls and re-templated existing WPF controls are fantastic and all the code can be downloaded for free. In fact, if you just read the book and don't look at the code you are really missing out. Just using some of these controls really got some of my own creative juices flowing.

To end, here is what I (@adajos) tweeted about this book:

"The 5 most useful tips I found in WPF Control Development Unleashed. 1. Use AddOwner Instead of Creating a New DependencyProperty #WPF

2. Listen for PropertyChanged events on Dependency Properties with DependencyPropertyDescriptor's AddValueChanged() #WPF

3. How/when to do a Weak Event Pattern with IWeakEventListener and subclassing WeakEventManager. #WPF

4. The entire chapter on Virtualization in #WPF

5. Implementing Drag and Drop with Attached Properties. #WPF

Those were my 5 favorite tips from WPF Control Development Unleashed, but it was chock full of great content. Highly recommended. #WPF"

Just a collection of random tips and tricks - 2009-12-11
Reviewer Rating:
I'll join the other reviewer and give it just one star. But I do mean it's worth one star, not 0 or -5 stars, because I did learn a thing or two from it, but these tips aren't worth the price of the book and the price of wasting a lot of time skipping page after page of nonsense.

Everyone should read the author's bio before buying a book, and in this case, one is an MVP, which is sort of a stigma in my opinion, as these MVPs just play with technologies and promote them, and generally offer little insight or vision. The other has the dubious title of .NET Architect, which carries even more negative elements.

Contrast that with the book by Charles Petzold, and industry legend; or the book by Chris Sells, a well known .NET GUI programming expert and have several popular .NET books under his belf already; or the book by Adam Nathan, a "senior software development engineer" at Microsoft, that job title alone means he's at least 5 times smarter than an MVP or a so-called .NET architect(although this doesn't guarantee good writing), then you see Adam has written the most authoritative book on .NET/COM interop, which kinda proves his writing skills.

Awesome Book - 2009-10-09
Reviewer Rating:
This is a really awesome book that will really help you to understand developing in WPF even if you never create a control - it is much more than just about control development.

The book quality and code quality are outstanding.

I highly recommend this book.

David Roh

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