Microsoft Silverlight Books

Much Needed Book on Building WPF Controls

I've been writing apps for business and pleasure in WPF for 2.5 years now. I own every significant book on WPF that is out there. Most are quite good, and can do a nice job showing Joe Developer how to build an app in WPF by teaching about the out-of-the-box controls, basic data binding, validation, DataTemplates, ControlTemplates, Styles, Triggers, etc. That sort of book can get you building an app that looks very nice and leaves its WinForms battleship gray apps in the dust.

However, actually building custom controls in WPF is a topic that is barely glanced upon in most of those books. Furthermore, there simply wasn't much information specifically on the topic of building your own WPF controls on MSDN. The best sources where blogs such as Josh Smith, Dr WPF, and Pavan Podila (one of the authors). But a book that systematically covered the topic was a void that has been very nicely filled by WPF Control Development Unleashed. This is great because well-done custom controls can really increase the "sizzle" of an app and make it enjoyable to use.

As others have written, this book isn't for someone who is just learning WPF. It is for some advanced developers who are building their own WPF controls. On the first page the authors explain that they are going to teach the "whys" of WPF so that compelling apps can be built, and that they are also maintainable and can stand the test of time because they are built in accordance with the WPF design philosophy. I think the book does a great job of achieving that goal.

One of the biggest strengths of the book is that it spends time showing when NOT to build a custom WPF control in favor of re-templating existing controls. They creatively give a number of examples of this, including using a WPF ListBox to actually display an animated radar screen! Re-purposing existing controls through their ControlTemplates should always be explored before actually building a new custom WPF Control. They also cover the WPF class hierarchy and explain that when building a custom WPF control it is very important to subclass from the correct WPF class.

My favorite chapters were "Building Custom Panels", "Using Existing Controls", "Advanced Scrolling", "Virtualization", "Custom Animations", "Events, Commands, and Focus", and "Advanced Data Binding". These chapters delve into the plumbing of WPF in ways other books don't. Unless you are a WPF rockstar you will learn lots of new things about these topics. Maybe you'll learn about the levels of data binding precedence, or how you can receive change notification for dependency properties that a control doesn't provide an event for, new ways to use Attached Properties--or maybe just some guidelines over when to use Commands or RoutedEvents. You will learn something you didn't know before, even about WPF topics you have used extensively.

Is this book perfect? No, of course not. It simply cannot cover everything about WPF in full detail. For instance, you will find some discussion of WPF design patterns (MVVM, etc) but as these are not the main focus of the book there wasn't room to cover them (and all their flavors). In fact I really think there would be room for a book entirely devoted to WPF flavors of UI design patterns. Despite a few minor shortcomings along these lines, I feel this book merits 5 stars.

The authors' examples of custom WPF controls and re-templated existing WPF controls are fantastic and all the code can be downloaded for free. In fact, if you just read the book and don't look at the code you are really missing out. Just using some of these controls really got some of my own creative juices flowing.

To end, here is what I (@adajos) tweeted about this book:

"The 5 most useful tips I found in WPF Control Development Unleashed. 1. Use AddOwner Instead of Creating a New DependencyProperty #WPF

2. Listen for PropertyChanged events on Dependency Properties with DependencyPropertyDescriptor's AddValueChanged() #WPF

3. How/when to do a Weak Event Pattern with IWeakEventListener and subclassing WeakEventManager. #WPF

4. The entire chapter on Virtualization in #WPF

5. Implementing Drag and Drop with Attached Properties. #WPF

Those were my 5 favorite tips from WPF Control Development Unleashed, but it was chock full of great content. Highly recommended. #WPF"



Joshua Adams
06 January, 2010

The book is horrible.

The book is horrible. If you expect to learn how to create controls, you will be disappointed unless you are already a guru in WPF in which case you know how to make controls and you don't need this book.
The very first example of "attached properties" is a piece of code that should be probably studied by cypher experts of Bletchley Park. Some blame goes to Microsoft for typical Redmond nonsense programming style but complete lack of good explanation is criminal. The example is full of convoluted code calls to unexplained myriad of strange classes without much of an explanation why than has to be done that way. After that example authors conclude that you already mastered "attached properties". Other examples and tricks are pretty much the same. Bunch of pieces of complicated code and not much explanation why code has to use particular classes or make specific calls. The underlying assumption is that you already have deep knowledge of WPF! Who in the right mind with deep knowledge would need a book to learn basics of controls? Lot of text is devoted to useless comparisons of writing code to building a house analogy. At the fourth chapter I was really sorry that there is no money back guarantee. The book is complete waste of money. On the sixth chapter I gave up. Anybody want to purchase cheap book out there (used up to the sixth chapter) ? I will be looking for a book that knows how to explain stuff to beginners. If you want to learn WPF custom controls look somewhere else.


Jacek Marchel
29 July, 2010

Inside the design of WPF custom controls

I would not say that this is my favorite WPF book, and I have eight of them. But, it gets into the narrow area of custom control design and how to make the WPF jump through the hoops that you want want it to cover so you can learn how to teach it new tricks.

The book introduces the underlying hierarchy of classes that operate in control design and gives a summary explanation of their purpose. By chapter 5 the book is showing how to make some extreme, but conceptually useful modifications to common controls. A ring guage and a radar display panel are detailed in their design. Fllowing chapters cover use of properties, resources, and binding. Further chapters cover animation, visual effects, and skinning. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 cover 2D mapping into 3D projections, custom animations, and finally pixel shading. The final chapters cover commands, events, picture focus transition, and dependency properties.

Although I would have preferred a more in depth approach that would make the class hierarchy more immediately understandable, the book delivers on its premise that it cover some of the inner design capabilities of WPF controls. I received several useful viewpoints of a control's design potential and a very good idea of how to build extensions to common controls that will be useful in my future work.

In just under 350 pages, this book has upgraded my understanding of WPF controls to an expert level and given me food for thought. Now, don't misunderstand my rating of this material, the book is not complete until it gets into showing a complete design and distribution and covers use of the WPF custom control library project. For these reasons, I gave it only 4 stars.

If you are serious about getting WPF working well for you, your library will have at least four WPF books in it. There is no way to shorten the process, either do the reading or hire someone who has. I find discovering the extent of WPF designs to be intriguing and satisfying. Now I'm off to do some mindbending graphic displays. One of them is going to let me drill down into a sea of a hundred thousand 3D color sprites to find collections of spreadsheet pages and another is going to give me that enticing Miami:CSI Aero screen with touch input that makes crime solving look inviting.

Robin T. Wernick
31 March, 2010

Much more than a resource book.

As a WPF enthusiast, learning WPF at the hobby level has not afforded me the financial resources to travel to Redmond Washington for week-long boot-camps, nor attend extended seminars or workshops to grow my skills and experience. As a result, my only recourse has been to utilize those resources available on the Internet, supplemented with whatever subject-matter texts become available. Unfortunately however, the examples/tutorials available on the internet are typically over-simplistic without insight and many of the subject-matter books turn out to be single-issue recipe books. Although I am happy to have those references when I need to solve a specific issue or problem, I don't find that those types of resources have truly helped me expand my understanding and knowledge of WPF overall. With WPF's long-standing reputation for it's significant learning curve, as well as it's myriad of "moving-parts", the need for a more in-depth understanding as to the design philosophy and structure behind WPF becomes very important to becoming productive and being able to make the most of the framework.

This is where I believe WPF Controls Development Unleashed comes in and has truly distinguished itself. The book attempts to explain the workings "behind the WPF curtain", over-viewing the different thinking necessary from conventional programming to take advantage of the API. The authors provide numerous examples through the book that not only show `how' to customize a control or modify a behavior, but also provides the insight into the design architecture and/or thinking, which can be used straight across the platform. The book is well-written and a delight to read.

With the significant power latent in the WPF platform, I would prefer that any limitations imposed upon my developments would be as a result of my own creativity and skill-level, not what I am able to locate and copy from the internet. I believe WPF Control Development Unleashed attempts to fill-in that limitation-gap and although it may not replace that week-long pilgrimage to Redmond Washington for training, I believe it comes as close as any book can.




W. Hunter
24 March, 2010

Excellent book for the experienced

If you have experience with WPF this is an excellent book. It may not have all the detailed code but has all the meaty topics you need. If it had code for every little thing it talks about it would probably be a 900-page book and much less appealing. This is a 350-page book but very dense. Every page has tons of useful information.
It's a nice complement to Adam Nathan's book (ISBN 0672628917).

Gustavo Cavalcanti
30 October, 2009