There has been much talk on the intertubes recently , or the possible subsumption of WPF by the Silverlight platform. As well as the possibility that the Windows team at Microsoft are not buying into XAML and WPF/Silverlight, or more fundamentally, the whole Managed code revolution. Apparently, the Windows team—from what I read—would rather take a bet on compiled JavaScript and HTML5, which is surprisingly similar to Silverlight in goals but not in technology or implementation.

While some of this talk may be alarmist or just rumour, for which people are talking solace , and . Anyone who has worked in the technology industry for any period of time will have to admit to this immutable truth: Everything changes. All the time.

Today's WPF was yesterday’s WinForms, today’s ASP.NET MVC was yesterday’s WebForms, and so on.  There have been dozens of UI technologies developed over the years for the Windows platform, both managed and unmanaged alike, but here’s the fundamental point: technology does not die, it’s abandoned, it cannot be killed (just look at IE6 and I can still download Visual Basic 3.0 from MSDN today!)—what this means is that actually YOU have a choice, YOU decide when a technology is dead to YOU; not the Windows team, not anyone else, but simply YOU. The decision is all yours.

Here’s just a few UI technologies that I’ve worked with over the last 15+ years:

• Access (v1.0 and v2.0)
• Excel (v4.0 macros and v5.0 VBA)
• Word (v2.0 Macros and v5.0 VBA)
• Visual Basic (3, 4, 5 and 6)
• IDC and HTX Web Templates
• HTML/DHTML/CSS and JavaScript (from the late 90’s to today)
• Classic ASP (from V1 until it was replaced with Managed Code and ASP.NET in 2002)
• ASP.NET (1.0, 2.0 and 4.0)
• ASP.NET MVC (1.0 and now 2.0)
• Silverlight (1, 2 and now 4)
• Windows Forms (all versions)
• WPF (All versions)

Interestingly, you can use just about any one of these technologies, in one form or another, still today to build your applications for the Windows platform.

I think of it this way: Even if Microsoft announced that WPF will not be actively developed from today—this very day, even though —we’ll still have five years of patches and maintenance. Five years of you being able to choose to use it in a production environment, even then the technology won’t be “dead”. You may simply choose to abandon it long before then, but that does not mean it’s dead, far from it.

So to hear that WPF is “dead” or that I’m going to have to brush up on my JavaScript and learn HTML5 in the near future it’s like: “Well, like duh! Dude. News just in: water is wet…”. Things change, deal with it. Learning something new comes with the territory; if the Windows team want to abandon managed code, WPF and Silverlight, for whatever reason (and remember, this might not even be true, this is what’s being spouted on the intertubes) then so be it. But *I* don’t have to, I get to choose, and today I choose WPF and Silverlight and probably will for at least the next 5 years… unless something more shiny comes along ;)

Think deeply, code well. If you have any comments or opinions that you’d like to share on this topic or any other, I’d love to hear from your. [-]

I have recently finished reading by Adam Nathan, published by Sams; it is unquestionably one of the best books on WPF available to developers today, both new and old alike. I read the original WPF Unleashed when it was first published a couple of years ago and I was as massively impressed then as I am now; both because Adam tells the WPF story so well, and with the second edition. The book was the first to be published using colour—and it used colour in a big way—which was very important when showing off a new, massively visual, UI technology such as WPF.

However, as the years passed and my WPF experience and knowledge had grown, I’ve found myself picking up the original book less and less, which I guess is not that surprising. Unfortunately though, whenever I did have a need to pick the book up, to look for some specific piece of information that I knew was in their somewhere, I usually had to put the book back down again with a feeling of extreme frustration. In short, for me at least, the original book was brilliantly presented, technically excellent, but has turned out to be a terrible reference book^[*], as I simply could never find what I was looking for amidst the story being told.

So given the quality of the first edition and all the new features that have been poured into WPF since the last book was published, I really looked forward to reading the second edition. Again, I’ve been blown away with his excellent style and presentation of technical information. So good in fact, I found myself re-reading bits I read from the first edition with great enthusiasm and gusto, relishing being reminded about features, facts and gotchas that I’d forgotten since the first time around. On that note, I think that this book greatly rewards those who read it more than once. Read it once—from cover-to-cover—when you’re starting out, but before your first real project, and then again some time/months later, after you complete your first couple of projects—again, ensure you read it cover-to-cover.

In conclusion, due to Adams story telling style I still think that this new edition will still make a poor reference book, not the type of book that you’ll dip in and out of to quickly find that fiddly bit of XAML syntax, sitting just outside of your grasp. However, as a means for learning WPF from scratch, or to simply deepen your WPF knowledge, this book is definitely for you and I could not recommend it more highly. It just shouldn’t be the only book on WPF that you own, you’ll probably also want a reference type book too.

Just one question remains, should you buy the second edition if you already own the first edition? The answer to that question is simply: Yes. There is enough new and updated material, presented in the best possible way, to make it well worth it.

If this review has helped you, if you have a different opinion or if you have a recommendation on a WPF book I would love to hear from you.

Think deeply and code well. []

^[*] A book that works as both an excellent aid for the new or old WPF developer, as well as an excellent reference book, is .