Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides you with a development framework for building high-quality user experiences for the Windows operating system. It blends together rich content from a wide range of sources and allows you unparalleled access to the processing power of your Windows computer. Pro WPF 4.5 in VB provides a thorough, authoritative guide to how WPF really works. Packed with no-nonsense examples and practical advice you'll learn everything you need to know in order to use WPF in a professional setting. The book begins by building a firm foundation of elementary concepts, using your existing VB skills as a frame of reference, before moving on to discuss advanced concepts and demonstrate them in a hands-on way that emphasizes the time and effort savings that can be gained.

Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-quality user experiences for the Windows operating system. It blends the application user interface, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of your computer’s operating system. Its functionality extends to the support for tablet PCs and other forms of input device, and provides a more modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility and user interface automation infrastructure, data-driven user interface and visualization, and integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell. This book shows you how WPF really works. It provides you with the no-nonsense, practical advice that you need in order to build high-quality WPF applications quickly and easily. Having built a firm foundation, it goes on to explore more advanced aspects of WPF and how they relate to the others elements of the .NET 4.0 platform and associated technologies such as Silverlight.

This book explains how WPF works from the ground up. It goes deep into the core of the technology in 800 pages of content-rich explanation. It will be one of the first books available on the topic, and also one of the most detailed. The book follows on from the author’s previous, and highly successful books, covering Windows Forms (WPF's predecessor technology) and earlier versions of WPF. It provides a one-stop shop in Apress’ proven ‘Pro’ style that leaves readers with a deep understanding of the technology and able to take the concepts away and apply them for themselves.

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) blends application user interface, documents, and media content to provide richer control, design, and development of the visual aspects of Windows programs. In this book, author Matthew MacDonald shows you how WPF really works. His no-nonsense, practical advice will get you quickly and easily building high-quality WPF applications. MacDonald takes you through a thorough investigation of the more advanced aspects of WPF, and its relation to other elements of the WinFX stack and the .NET Framework 3.5, to complete your understanding of WPF and C# 2008.

Professional WPF Programming If you want to learn how to build killer user interfaces for Windows and the web, then this book is for you. It arms you with the tools and code you'll need to effectively utilize the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). From creating appealing graphics and animated structures to enhancing performance and security, you'll be programming in no time. First you'll explore the WPF framework and learn how to develop basic applications with ASP.NET or Visual Basic(r). Next you'll discover how to build more sophisticated WPF interfaces using Microsoft(r) ExpressionBlend and then progress to more advanced programming techniques. Throughout the book, you'll find best practices for enterprise architectures using the WPF and its underlying technology. All this will help you quickly learn how to develop next-generation applications on the .NET 2.0 platform using the WPF. What you will learn from this book How to write applications with identical UIs on both Windows and the web Tips for collaborating design and code development with Microsoft(r) Expression Blend All about the object models, built-in server controls, HTML markup, code-behind, and the coordinative structure of each file How to migrate Win32 applications to WPF Techniques for integrating special effects and custom controls into an application Advanced development concepts, including building workflows and a WCF service Who this book is for This book is for experienced .NET developers who want to begin creating WPF web and desktop applications. Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-browser technology for creating rich user experiences on the Web. Like its predecessor, Silverlight 4 rides atop the .NET framework for maximum ease of use and coding efficiency. The technology carries forward much of the work that has been done before and augments it in many important respects, including support for H.264 video, major improvements to the graphics engine (including true 3D rendering), and much richer data-binding options for interfacing with other applications. Pro Silverlight 4 in VB is an invaluable reference for professional developers who want to discover the features of Silverlight. Author Matthew MacDonald's expert advice guides you through creating rich media applications using Silverlight in the environment you're most productive in—no matter what the target platform. As you learn about the features that put Silverlight in direct competition with Adobe Flash, such as rich support for 2D and 3D drawing, animations, and media playback, you'll experience the plumbing of .NET and the design model of WPF through Silverlight—all of the same .NET technology that developers use to design next-generation Windows applications. In this book, MacDonald provides a comprehensive tutorial written from professional developer to professional developer.

Visual Studio is a development IDE created by Microsoft to enable easier development for Microsoft programming languages as well as development technologies. It has been the most popular IDE for working with Microsoft development products for the past 10 years. Extensibility is a key feature of Visual Studio. There have not been many books written on this aspect of Visual Studio. Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) can be considered a hard topic to learn for many developers in comparison with most .NET related topics. Also, its APIs are very complex and not very well written. Some may refer to these APIs as “dirty” because they do not have good structure, naming convention, or consistency. Visual Studio is now 10 years old. It was created during the COM days for COM programming but later migrated to .NET. However, Visual Studio still relies heavily on COM programming. It was revamped when moving to the .NET platform but still contains its COM nature; this fact is what makes it harder for .NET developers to work with VSX. Because it is an older product built on two technologies, it has produced inconsistency in code. Although there are problems with the current version of VSX, the future looks bright for it. The many different teams working on the software have been moved into one umbrella group known as the Visual Studio Ecosystem team. Throughout the past 10 years Visual Studio has continued to grow and new extensibility features have been added. Learning all of the options with their different purposes and implementations is not easy. Many extensibility features are broad topics such as add-ins, macros, and the new domain-specific language tools in Visual Studio. Learning these topics can be difficult because they are not closely related to general .NET programming topics. This book is for .NET developers who are interested in extending Visual Studio as their development tool. In order to understand the book you must know the following material well: Object-oriented programming (OOP), the .NET Framework and .NET programming, C# or Visual Basic languages, some familiarity with C++, some familiarity with XML and its related topics, and Visual Studio structure and usage. A familiarity with COM programming and different .NET technologies is helpful. The aims of this book are to: Provide an overview of all aspects of VSX Enable readers to know where/when to use extensibility Familiarize readers with VS Extensibility in detail Show readers the first steps and let them learn through their own experiences Use examples, sample code, and case studies to demonstrate things in such a way that helps readers understand the concepts Avoid bothering readers with long discussions and useless code samples In order to use this book, and get the most out of it, there are some technical requirements. You must have the following two packages installed on your machine to be able to read/understand the chapters and test code samples: Visual Studio 2008 Team System Edition (or other commercial editions) Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 (or its newer versions) You will need to buy Visual Studio 2008 to register for an evaluation version. The Free Express editions of Visual Studio do not support the extensibility options. The Visual Studio SDK is needed in order to read some of the chapters in the book and can be downloaded as a free package. The operating system doesn’t matter for the content of the book, but all code was written with Visual Studio 2008 Team System Edition in Windows Vista x86. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 will give you an introduction to the basic concepts you need to understand before you can move on to the rest of the book. Chapter 4 discusses the automation model, which is an important prerequisite for many of the chapters in the book that focus on add-ins, macros, and VSPackages. Chapters 5-14 will utilize add-ins in a case study to learn about the main responsibilities of the automation model and some of the more common techniques used in VSX development. Each of the following chapters is dedicated to a specific extensibility option; they are independent of one another and you can read them in any order. It is important to read chapters 4-14 before you begin reading about the specific extensibility options. Chapter 5 contains a walk-through of the Add-in Wizard and describes its steps. Chapter 6 will show you the anatomy of add-ins and explain how to create add-ins and how they work. Chapter 7 discusses how to manipulate solutions, projects, and project items via your code to build add-ins. Chapter 8 shows you how to deal with documents and code editors in your add-ins. Chapter 9 explains how to work with programming codes and how to manipulate their elements. Chapter 10 describes some ways to work with user interface elements, Windows Forms, and controls via code in your add-ins. Chapter 11 discusses the Tools Options page and uses add-ins as the case study to show you how to create your own Tools Options pages. Chapter 12 teaches you how to debug and test your add-ins. Chapter 13 shows you how to deploy your add-ins. Chapter 14 completes the discussion about add-ins by talk about resources and localization of add-ins. Chapter 15 discusses a new feature in VS 2008: the Visual Studio Shell. Chapter 16 talks about domain-specific language tools; you will learn how to build them and see a quick overview of DSL tools. Chapter 17 discusses debugging and how to extend debugging features. Chapter 18 talks about VSPackages as a way to extend VS functionality and add something new to its existing packages. Chapter 19 teaches you what a code snippet is and how to write and manage code snippets in Visual Studio to make your coding process easier. Chapter 20 talks about VS project templates and starter kits and how to write your own project templates. Chapter 21 focuses on MSBuild and writing custom builds for Visual Studio and .NET applications. Chapter 22 discusses Visual Studio macros in detail and explains how to build a Visual Studio macro. Keyvan Nayyeri is a software architect and developer. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in applied mathematics. His main focus is on Microsoft development technologies and their related markup languages. Nayyeri is also a team leader and developer for several .NET open-source projects; this includes writing code for special purposes. He holds an MVP award for Comunnity Server. He recently co-authored Wrox Professional Community Server (2007).