I wrote about books on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF from now on) before. I am one of those that thinks WPF is significant for all Windows developers. Once Microsoft sets the standard with WPF, I am sure other vendors will follow and WPF (or a variant of it) will become significant for developers on other platforms too.

Quite some time  ago, I bought and read Chris Sells’ and Ian Griffiths’ WPF book. It was good and I liked it. Chris Andersons’ book is still in the finishing stages, but Petzold’s book is just out. Charles Petzold is a legend in Windows world, most of the developers I know learned Windows programming (using C/C++ and the Win32 API) from his book.

Well, I am happy to report that Charles’ book Application = Markup + Code is great. Unlike Sells’ book that mainly deals with markup (XAML), Charles spends half of the book using just C# code to produce WPF apps. It makes sense to focus more on XAML as it is less familiar to the average C# developer. However, showing you C# code gives you great second perspective on the way WPF works and if anything, after seeing long and convoluted segments of code that prepare control templates, you will only appreciate XAML’s terseness more.

You don’t have to have a book to evaluate it! The code samples are available and they work with RC1 release of Windows Vista and .NET 3.0 runtime (that has to be installed on Windows XP machines). Check them out – they’re great. The book is very long, but there’s a lot of code inside and the topics get more complicated progressively and slowly. The approach is much alike bottom-up – larger blocks of functionality get built from smaller ones.

Charles builds several useful WPF utilities during the course of the book but I find his “Dump Control Template” the best – not only have I not seen anything like it from other authors, the utility is extremely useful: it shows you exactly how Microsoft built the “built-in” controls like slider (on the picture to the right, quite a complicated one!), progress bar, button…

If for some reason you must choose only one book on WPF, you should choose Petzold’s. Otherwise, buy them all (I know I will). As I’ve said before, it’ll take some time until this technology sinks in and you’ll need all the help you can get.