About this book
This book is designed to give you a working knowledge of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The assumption is that the reader is already a .NET developer with some familiarity with other UI technologies (WinForms, MFC, HTML) but is new to WPF. In particular, the book focuses on using WPF with Visual Studio 2008, which we believe is the primary tool that most WPF developers will use, although we still spend some time talking about other available tools.
Throughout the book, your authors have injected some measure of their twisted humor, and have been known, on occasion, to resort to irony and sarcasm. We truly love WPF, but we also try not to take anything too seriously—and we hope that it makes reading yet another technical book just that little bit less gnaw-your-own-leg-off boring.
This book is broken down into four main parts. Part 1 is mostly about history and overviews. Chapter 1 starts this off by explaining how drawing in Windows and on the web got to where they are today, and the general way in which WPF addresses some existing problems. Chapter 2 is the first chance to get your feet wet with some simple WPF code, and also provides a guided tour of WPF-specific features of Visual Studio 2008. Chapter 3 provides a reasonably detailed look at what WPF is made of, as well as various surrounding technologies and acronyms that are likely to cross your path.