| Thank you for picking up Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed! To avoid unsatisfied customers, I want to clarify that this is not a book about Microsoft PowerPoint (which many people consider to be the foundation of Windows presentations)! Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft’s latest technology for creating graphical user interfaces, whether they consist of plain forms, document-centric windows, animated cartoons, videos, immersive 3D environments, or all of the above! This is a technology that makes it easier than ever to create a broad range of applications. For example, WPF makes it relatively straightforward to implement applications similar to Windows Media Player, Microsoft Word (or at least WordPad), and, yes, even Microsoft PowerPoint!
Ever since WPF was publicly announced in 2003 (with the code name of “Avalon”), it has gotten considerable (and deserved) attention for the ways in which it revolutionizes the process of creating software—especially for Windows programmers used to Windows Forms and GDI. It’s relatively easy to create fun, useful, and shareable WPF samples that demonstrate all kinds of techniques that are difficult to accomplish in other technologies. But WPF is quite a departure from previous technologies in terms of its programming model, underlying concepts, and basic terminology. Even viewing the source code for WPF (by cracking open its components with a tool like .NET Reflector) is a confusing experience because the code you’re looking for often doesn’t reside where you’d expect. When you combine all of this with the fact that there are often several ways to accomplish any task, you arrive at a conclusion shared by many: WPF has a very steep learning curve.
That’s where this book comes in. Five years ago, I wrote .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide because I felt there was a need for an entire book to guide people through such a deep and complex topic. As WPF was developed, it was obvious that there would be no shortage of WPF books in the marketplace. But it wasn’t clear to me that the books would have the right balance to guide people through the technology and its unique concepts while showing practical ways to exploit it.
About the Author
Adam Nathan is a senior software development engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Division. He is the author of the acclaimed .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide (SAMS, 2002), a coauthor of ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials, and Code (SAMS, 2001), and a contributor to books such as .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Vol. 2 (Addison-Wesley, 2005) and Windows Developer Power Tools (O’Reilly, 2006). Adam regularly speaks at development conferences and to groups within Microsoft about a variety of .NET Framework topics. Having started his career on Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime team in 1999, Adam has been at the core of .NET technologies since the very beginning. Adam is also the creator of popular tools and websites for .NET developers, such as PINVOKE.NET, CLR SPY (and its Visual Studio add-in), and XAMLshare.com. You can find him online at www.adamnathan.net.
Daniel Lehenbauer is the lead software design engineer responsible for the 3D features in Windows Presentation Foundation. Prior to WPF, he worked on multiple graphics and UI technologies, including mobile controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Daniel is active in the WPF community and blogs about 3D graphics using WPF at www.viewport3D.com. |
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