My Favorite WPF Book of All Times–WPF Control Development Unleashed

Whenever I pick up a technical book to acquaint myself with a particular technology, I personally look for the philosophy which makes that particular technology relevant in the field. After all, if you just want an introduction or code samples, the internet is a valuable resource - why bother buying a book, right?

About an year and half ago, I was put in-charge of UI design of our product using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and started looking out for resources on the web, in the libraries and books. I finally stumbled upon this masterpiece by Pavan Podila and Kevin Hoffman called WPF Control Development Unleashed.

I really loved how the book introduces the philosophy of WPF UI design and the diverse visual class structure in the opening chapters. Most admirably how authors provide insight and emphasis into code reuse, UI templating, extending existing controls using attached properties before jumping on to custom controls. In fact, many examples in the book illustrate how extending existing UI controls result in more maintainable code without much effort.

The book covers a very broad spectrum of UI development in WPF such as building custom panels, UI virtualization, advanced scrolling, 2D and 3D animations, pixel shader effects and even rare topics such as UI automation which are skipped in many other books I have read. The book is a pure joy to read and I have personally read this book about three times, if not more.

I have been successful in applying concepts from the book into our product – BlackBerry Desktop Software, and so has my team. I highly recommend this book for any serious WPF developer who can gain end to end insight into the technology from this fabulous resource.