I’ve read many “how to program with WPF” books, and already have a year of programming experience in WPF, so I’m really not able to fairly review books like Programming WPF, by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths, at least from a beginner’s point of view. This book is actually the second edition; I reviewed the first edition way back in October 17, 2005.

I’ll start with my conclusion – there is enough important material unique to this book that it is a must-have for the shelf of a WPF programmer. Despite its girth (835 pages), it isn’t able to explain every facet of WPF in detail – in particular, I noticed that the Border class was given very little reference. I was worried that I wouldn’t find much of anything I didn’t already know, but I was fortunately wrong on that account, and will close the review by summarizing the most interesting bits:

• p. 59: You can safely use data binding with Settings.
• p. 136: Explains how focus scope affects command routing.
• p. 189: Good information on validation, including custom validation.
• p. 226: Grouping with PropertyGroupDescription.
• p. 298: Handy table of the template parts used by each control.
• p. 336: The ValidateBindings method.
• p. 341: You can navigate a NavigationWindow to a string.
• p. 379: It’s dangerous to use types as resource keys.
• ch. 12: Great information on resources.
• p. 432: Working with bitmaps and bitmap effects.
• p. 484: Low-level text output.
• ch. 15: Outstanding information on printing.
• p. 672: Using attached properties to identify template placeholders.
• p. 730: Screenshots demonstrating airspace issues with interop.