Author: Matthew MacDonald
Publisher: Apress, 2008
Pages: 1000
ISBN: 978-1590599624
Aimed at: WPF developers wishing to work in VB
Rating: 4.5
Pros: Clear, comprehensive
Cons: Dense
Reviewed by: Dave Wheeler
        
Increasingly, authors and publishers ignore the Visual Basic community, with the new hot topics receiving coverage in C#. So it is gratifying that MacDonald and Apress have taken his existing C# book and converted it to the Visual Basic language. As ever, MacDonald offers a vast amount of coverage of WPF, and he has updated the book to cover the new features delivered in 3.5, such as improvements in data binding and support for add ins. However, and this is a reasonably significant if you’re thinking of buying this book, there is no coverage of the new 3.5 SP1 features, nor of the next generation of WPF controls that are expected to ship over the coming months. Unsurprisingly, if you already own a WPF 3.0 book, then there is little motivation to shell out the extra cash to buy this one as well. Instead, this book will only appeal to developers who are both new to WPF and who wish to code using Visual Basic.
MacDonald writes well, and the explanations are clear. However, I still prefer Adam Nathan’s “WPF Unleashed” (Sams, 2007; ISBN: 978-0672328916) as an introductory work on WPF. The advantage that this book has, though, is that it has broader coverage and, of course, it’s available for Visual Basic. Ultimately, this is a very solid book on WPF, and I would happily recommend it to any VB developers that are moving to WPF.

<Reviewed in VSJ>