Customer Reviews

Pro WPF with VB 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At last, someone has published a WPF book aimed at those of us who prefer to use Visual Basic for the code behind.

This is another well-written and comprehensive piece of work from a widely respected author.

Unsurprisingly, large chunks of content have been ported directly from his earlier WPF book, which was based on .NET 3.0 and has C# as the code behind. This makes complete sense as it is only the code behind aspects that need the different approach.

Because this is based on WPF 3.5 though, there are some additional items, such as binding to a LINQ expression in Chapter 16. There is also a completely new additional Chapter 26, which deals with the topics of Multithreading and Add-Ins.

I don't think Apress have the full chapter listing on their site yet (or at least I couldn't see it if they did). However, rest assured that the whole gamut of WPF topics is covered in this book, from Layout to Dependency Properties, Routed Events to Navigation - in fact everything from Animation to Z-Index.

The author has a very useful list of links that you can simply click on to save you (mis)typing them yourself from the book. They are available from his site at www.prosetech.com. Downloadable samples are available from there also.

In my opinion, you should buy this book for two reasons.

First, it is an excellent, wide ranging, clear description of what you will need to know in order to get fully to grips with this exciting (but not always intuitive) technology.

Second, there have been at least five WPF books published in the past year that have C# as the code behind. Publishers are in the business of selling books and they couldn't care less about whether C# or VB are "better". So I guess it's obvious that their stats show that they will sell more C# books. If you want to keep VB as a viable language, fully supported by authors and publishers, then the only way to ensure this is to make it worth their while to publish VB based books.

So for either or both these reasons, I rate this book as one of the most worthwhile investments you can make if you are a VB developer (or student) and you want to fully embrace all the tempting offerings available in Windows Presentation Foundation.

Upon first glance I would have expected this to be a simple "C#->VB.NET" translation of MacDonald's earlier offering, but even if that is the case it has been very well tailored to suit the VB.NET coder's standards and tastes. MacDonald goes into great detail with all of his examples and tends never to leave an errant XAML tag or line of VB.NET code unexplained. He points out various intricacies of the new features of the 3.5 framework, but despite all of this manages to keep things simple and engaging.

For the average WinForms coder, XAML and the other related technologies that made their début in .NET 3.0/3.5 can seem very daunting and often times totally unnecessary. MacDonald does a great job of explaining not only how to use the new technologies, but why they came about in the first place, Microsoft's motivation for creating (and pushing) them, and their benefits. In doing so he manages to - dare I say it - glamorise the new platform by extolling its virtues which served to make me as a reader and coder really want to start using XAML instead of WinForms. Without it, any initial efforts by me tended to be abortive and resulted in me resorting to using the much more familiar WinForms toolset.

I would recommend this to any VB.NET coder who is eager to make the transition from WinForms but has no idea how or where to start. MacDonald walks you through the basics and gives you the confidence you need to really get your teeth into that killer WPF app you've been meaning to write.

My only problems with the book are the occasional grammatical errors. Given that it was supposed to be an update to a prior book MacDonald wrote, you might expect the non-sensical sentences and grammatical errors to have been picked up by proof readers prior to publishing. In this case I started to notice them within the first two or three chapters and they made regular appearances throughout, which admittedly shook my confidence in the value of the book slightly, but the technical information it provides really has been invaluably helpful so far.

I enjoyed this book until I got midway through chapter 9. Up to this point, when I had a bug, I noticed that I couldn't really run WinDiff or CSDiff, because he's not holding your hand when he sets up the examples. Okay, fine, that strengthens my debugging skills. But, for example, although he doesn't tell you this in the book, in some of the chapters, he's actually working with one project that has a menu pointing to each of the concepts as he introduces it. Conceptually, that works okay, but to really learn something, I need to actually do it myself. Now I'm trying to track down a simple bug, but the layout of my code behind the code is different enough that I'm finding it extremely difficult. So do I keep spending my valuable time debugging to find what's probably simply an omission of a line of code, or do I plow ahead? And there are some things in his code that aren't explained, like a boolean variable, isReplaying, defined for the class, but only used within one function. Since the class implements an interface, is there something going on behind the scenes? Who knows?

I've also submitted errata for this book, but I notice they haven't been published on the web site yet. Perhaps my errata are wrong. Perhaps not, and nobody's gotten around to checking it out yet. In the mean time, I notice a version for VB 2010 is in the works and will be published within the next couple of months.

In other words, technical proof-reading leaves something to be desired. Sadly, that seems to be more and more of a problem with computer books. It's a shame, because in many ways, this really is a good book.

[Sigh.] Is this what the market has come to for technical books?

This is a very strongly written book; it is easy to follow even thru the complex portions XAML and WPF.

This is a wonderfully written book! Very easy to follow and lots of detailed information about the most relevant WPF features and functions. Book has downloadable sample code which I found indispensible! If you are looking for a book that will teach you how to write WPF applications using VB.NET, this is it!

A well written book with lots of good info for the VB .NET programmer. I just wish it had some work through examples where you practice the information covered in each chapter. Having the sample code available helps, but actually coding helps you to learn the material better.