I consider myself pretty good at following directions. This book, Foundations in WPF, however, has beaten me. After three chapters I had to set it aside as being not for me. I'd like to give the author credit and say it is a brave person that writes on a beta product. An even braver one to publish a book while a product is still in beta. I just finished a Vista book where I had to chase changes in the product up until the final released product happened. (Shameless plug - Look for a Vista Bible Desktop Reference).

Unfortunately, the beta process did no favors for this book and results in my horrible rating of a 2. This is a result of comments like, "A great example of XAML applications is Microsoft Codenamed Max, which is available at http;//www.Microsoft.com/max." Unfortunately, this was a beta site for the Max service and the site currently thanks those that participates and indicates that it is no longer available. This makes it a lousy example to reference in the a book.

Moving on, you hit the next hurdle. Microsoft has new design tools called Expression. These are Expression Web that is now shipping, Expression Blend that is in a beta format at this time, and Expression Design that is in a community technology preview. There is also Expression Media coming. This is as the information is today.

Unfortunately, the book mentions Expression Graphic Designer, Expression Web Designer, and Expression Interactive Designer. It is Interactive Designer that you are to use in the initial chapters. Note that Interactive Designer is not the name of one of the products currently available on the Microsoft site. Oops. This is actually now the Blend product. This subtle change in name is indicative of some of the additional changes in the product. These changes are different enough to make it relatively hard to follow the author's directions.

While the change in the product make it a somewhat more difficult task of guessing the next step, it gets a bit harder due to the way the information is presented on building a sample application. Rather than clear steps that show what you should do, the author presents the information in a more long-winded paragraph form. While this is still relatively easy to follow, if you are not already familiar with the Blend tool, then figuring out where things don't match gets very difficult. If you find you missed a step and need to go back, then you have to really hunt to find where you missed.

Again, most of these issues are a result of a changing beta product and thus they make an outdated book (even though it published about a month ago). One very positive note is that the example used early in the book is relative to what you would actually consider doing rather than just a "textbook" example. Kudos to the author on this. Unfortunately, the best examples and topic coverage can't salvage a book that is on a product that has changed.

The chapters in the middle focus on XAML and can be done via Visual Studio. This information is actually not bad, although not very complex. The organization of the presentation also leaves a bit to be desired. Rather than seeming like a cohesive presentation for teaching the foundations of using WPF and the controls, it seems more like a lot of writings on different things the author picked and chose as important. That isn't to say it is bad, just that you get pulled through the information in the way the author thought about it. A bit of development work from the publisher could really help resolve this.

When this book is updated, it might get four stars (it is still hard to follow examples that are spread over several pages of text without the specific steps called out). As it stands, the book requires the reader to do too much work figuring how a few things work to warrant more than two stars.