Friday was something of a Red Letter Day in the Mead household, because that was the day that the book I've been looking forward to getting for months finally arrived on my doorstep. At last - a WPF book aimed at those of us who prefer to use Visual Basic for the code behind. The book is Matthew MacDonald's "Pro WPF with VB 2008", published by Apress.
In the couple of days since it arrived I obviously haven't been able to get too deeply into reading it - although my wife might offer a different opinion on how many hours I've spent with my head in this book since Friday! However, it's immediately clear that this is another well-written and comprehensive piece of work from a widely respected author.
Unsurprisingly, large chunks of content have been ported directly from his earlier WPF book, which was based on .NET 3.0 and has C# as the code behind. This makes complete sense as it is only the code behind aspects that need the different approach. We VB-ers are just as able to understand the general WPF and XAML explanations as our allegedly "sharper" developer brethren.
Because this is based on WPF 3.5 though, there are some additional items, such as binding to a LINQ expression in Chapter 16. There is also a completely new additional Chapter 26, which deals with the topics of Multithreading and Add-Ins.
I don't think Apress have the full chapter listing on their site yet (or at least I couldn't see it if they did). However, rest assured that the whole gamut of WPF topics is covered in this book, from Layout to Dependency Properties, Routed Events to Navigation - in fact everything from Animation to Z-Index.
The author has a very useful list of links that you can simply click on to save you (mis)typing them yourself from the book. These links and the downloadable code samples are available from here.
In my opinion, you should buy this book for two reasons.
First, it is an excellent, wide ranging, clear description of what you will need to know in order to get fully to grips with this exciting (but not always intuitive) technology.
Second, there have been at least five WPF books published in the past year that have C# as the code behind. Publishers are in the business of selling books and they couldn't care less about whether C# or VB are "better". So I guess it's obvious that their stats show that they will sell more C# books. If you want to keep VB as a viable language, fully supported by authors and publishers, then the only way to ensure this is to make it worth their while to publish VB based books.
So for either or both these reasons, I rate this book as one of the most worthwhile investments you can make if you are a VB developer (or student) and you want to fully embrace all the tempting offerings available in Windows Presentation Foundation.