T he purpose of this book is to teach you the fundamentals and mechanics of the C# progr- ming language. Most books teach programming primarily using text. That's great for novels, but many of the important concepts of programming languages can best be understood through a combination of words, figures, and tables. Many of us think visually, and figures and tables can help clarify and crystallize our und- standing of a concept. In several years of teaching programming languages, I have found that the pictures I drew on the whiteboards were the things that most quickly helped the students...

With WPF, Microsoft started from scratch and built a UI framework that is more logical, powerful, and integrated than previous frameworks. But it's different from previous frameworks, and you need to understand its structure and paradigms to use it effectively. One of the reasons WPF has a reputation of having a steep and extensive learning curve is that we, as programmers, think that all UI frameworks are pretty much the same, just with different API classes, methods, and parameters. In the case of WPF, however, this definitely is not case. The result is that when programmers just jump from...