Pro WPF in VB 2010

Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-quality user experiences for the Windows operating system. It blends the application user interface, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of your computer’s operating system.

Its functionality extends to the support for tablet PCs and other forms of input device, and provides a more modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility anduser interfaceautomation infrastructure, data-drivenuser interfaceand visualization, and integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell.

This book shows you how WPF really works. It provides you with the no-nonsense, practical advice that you need in order to build high-quality WPF applications quickly and easily. Having built a firm foundation, it goes on to explore more advanced aspects of WPF and how they relate to the others elements of the .NET 4.0 platform and associated technologies such as Silverlight.

What you’ll learn

• WPF basics: XAML, layout, control essentials, and data flow
• WPF applications: Navigation, commands, localization, and deployment
• Advanced controls: Custom controls, menus, toolbars, and trees
• WPF documents: Text layout, printing, and document packaging
• Graphics and multimedia: Drawing shapes, sound and video, animation, geometric transformations, and imaging

This book is designed for developers encountering WPF for the first time in their professional lives. A working knowledge of Visual Basic (VB) and the basic architecture of .NET is helpful to follow the examples easily, but all concepts will be explained from the ground up.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing WPF
2. XAML
3. Layout
4. Dependency Properties
5. Routed Events
6. Controls
7. The Application
8. Element Binding
9. Commands
10. Resources
11. Styles and Behaviors
12. Shapes, Brushes, and Transforms
13. Geometries and Drawings
14. Effects and Visuals
15. Animation Basics
16. Advanced Animation
17. Control Templates
18. Custom Elements
19. Data Binding
20. Formatting Bound Data
21. Data Views
22. Lists, Trees, and Grids
23. Windows
24. Pages and Navigation
25. Menus, Toolbars, and Ribbons
26. Sound and Video
27. 3-D Drawing
28. Documents
29. Printing
30. Interacting with Windows Forms
31. Multithreading
32. The Add-in Model
33. ClickOnce Deployment

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a key part of .NET 4.0 and provides the foundation for building applications and high-quality user experiences in the Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. WPF blends together user-interface design, dynamic documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of the user’s computing hardware.

This book explains how WPF works from the ground up. It will be one of the first books available, for the new .NET 4.0 version, and also one of the most detailed. It builds on the success of the author’s previous, industry leading, edition and plays to the same strengths—it is a one-stop shop in Apress’ proven ‘Pro’ style that leaves readers with a deep understanding of the technology and ready to take the concepts away and apply them for themselves.

Matthew MacDonald is an author, educator, and MCSD developer who has a passion for emerging technologies. He is a regular writer for developer journals such as Inside Visual Basic, ASPToday, and Hardcore Visual Studio .NET, and he's the author of several books about programming with .NET, including User Interfaces in VB .NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls, The Book of VB .NET, and .NET Distributed Applications. In a dimly remembered past life, he studied English literature and theoretical physics. Send e-mail to him with praise, condemnation, and everything in between, to [email protected].