Ebook: WPF Control Development Unleashed: Building Advanced User Experiences

I would not say that this is my favorite WPF book, and I have eight of them. But, it gets into the narrow area of custom control design and how to make the WPF jump through the hoops that you want want it to cover so you can learn how to teach it new tricks.

The book introduces the underlying hierarchy of classes that operate in control design and gives a summary explanation of their purpose. By chapter 5 the book is showing how to make some extreme, but conceptually useful modifications to common controls. A ring guage and a radar display panel are detailed in their design. Fllowing chapters cover use of properties, resources, and binding. Further chapters cover animation, visual effects, and skinning. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 cover 2D mapping into 3D projections, custom animations, and finally pixel shading. The final chapters cover commands, events, picture focus transition, and dependency properties.

Although I would have preferred a more in depth approach that would make the class hierarchy more immediately understandable, the book delivers on its premise that it cover some of the inner design capabilities of WPF controls. I received several useful viewpoints of a control's design potential and a very good idea of how to build extensions to common controls that will be useful in my future work.

In just under 350 pages, this book has upgraded my understanding of WPF controls to an expert level and given me food for thought. Now, don't misunderstand my rating of this material, the book is not complete until it gets into showing a complete design and distribution and covers use of the WPF custom control library project. For these reasons, I gave it only 4 stars.

If you are serious about getting WPF working well for you, your library will have at least four WPF books in it. There is no way to shorten the process, either do the reading or hire someone who has. I find discovering the extent of WPF designs to be intriguing and satisfying. Now I'm off to do some mindbending graphic displays. One of them is going to let me drill down into a sea of a hundred thousand 3D color sprites to find collections of spreadsheet pages and another is going to give me that enticing Miami:CSI Aero screen with touch input that makes crime solving look inviting.