WPF Simplified - The Idea That Became A Knowledge

Back in 2020

On Aug 12, 2020 I wrote an article describing the value of this community to me. Fast forward today lot of things happened in between, while going through this roller coaster we call “life”, there was one thing that was quite consistent. And that thing was this drafting this beautiful piece of knowledge also known as WPF Simplified.

Download eBook >> WPF SIMPLIFIED

The Mentorship

So why did I even decide to write a book? The reason was this one person Mahesh Chand, you may already know him. But how does Mahesh come into the picture?

So there I was writing my own articles on WPF and C# regularly. On June 03, 2020. I received a message from Mahesh. First I couldn't believe it was for real but later I washed my face and the message was still there. That's how I knew I wasn't dreaming at all. He appreciated the efforts I was doing for the community and then asked me to write a book with him. At first, I was hesitant because I have never written a book in my life. I don't know what goes into it, how to format, what is preface and writeups, all these jargon I never even heard of. But Mahesh did his job as a mentor to fuel the confidence in me.

Here we are, full of confidence and the idea.

The Plan

We had technical knowledge, so we made a plan. We used to connect on weekends to brainstorm the chapters and code examples. We used to come up with different approaches then finalize the best suited solution.

Let me ask you this: what do you need for a technical book?

First the "explanation of a topic conceptually" AND AND the "code" of course. If you can't prove your point with code snippets then it is as good as any other bedtime story book. So we decided to code almost everything in the book. We not only drafted the code snippets in the book but we also have a separate repository of code snippets chapter-wise. So it's not only the material but you also need to prove the concepts programmatically.

Rewriting the first chapter-1 ten times.

I tell you, it's not easy to write the first chapter. Why? because it's your selling point, People will stick to the next chapter only if they find the first chapter interesting.

What do I mean by rewriting the chapter 1, here let me explain you with these steps

Step 1: Write the chapter
Step 2: Read it yourself, see if it makes sense
Step 3: Code it out
Step 4: Add snaps of output

Well hold on a minute!! why are these snaps are in white background, its not following the consistency,

Step 4 AGAIN: Change theme to dark, get all the snaps again and add new snaps to the chapter.

Now we are good with chapter 1, at least that's what we thought, then here comes our reviewer and Microsoft MVP, Vinoth Rajendran. He had one glance at the chapter and said, guys it's too technical, we need to explain from basics. The problem was me and Mahesh both already knew WPF and C# so the persona for the book was ourselves.

You know what time it is? It's time to rewrite chapter 1.

Goal of 13 chapters

Finally beating around the bush for 3 months we had chapter 1. Then we formed 13 distinct chapters each focusing on specific part of WPF, we started from basics and went down the rabbit hole explaining the concept.

The dream team

Slowly our team got extended to 6 members now we have Praveen Kumar joined us to cover all the artifacts that we need for the book, we got Archi on the publishing side of the house and we got Sundaram to validate the book from another pair of eyes and that’s our dream team.

This went on for 2 years straight, the hard work, dedication, consistency call it whatever you may but I thoroughly enjoyed the entire journey and today Finally, we have our very precious book to help you learn WPF and give you the boost in your career.

Preface

When I started learning the WPF it was all over the place, there wasn't enough material on the internet, there were a lot of moving parts and it's hard to keep a track of all the topics or make sense of buzzwords. So here I am a software engineer turned author and I believe that you can not master a thing unless and until your basics are clear. Think like a compiler and you'll find a way.

WPF is the well known feature rich UI framework, In WPF Simplified we start from very basics and grow linearly topic by topic to make you expert in this arena. We have broken down hard topics into easily understandable chunks. This book will teach you the topics you need to implement in your day to day tasks, this will also prepare you to perform very best at your WPF interviews.

Learn all the basics, UI controls, styles, graphics, object communications and data binding with different data sources.

What are we covering?

13 in-depth topics covering extensive knowledge
31 different controls and their behaviors
XAML and its capabilities
How to style controls at different levels
Working with speech, documents, Ink
Working with data interfaced by Entity Framework, WebAPI, WCF, LINQ, Dapper

I wave you goodbye by promising you that at the end of the book you’ll have enough knowledge and confidence to implement industry level applications.

Thank you to entire team putting all the hard work to turn this idea into reality.

The team, Mahesh Chand, Rikam Palkar, Praveen Kumar, Archie Vankar, Vinoth Rajendran, Sundaram Subramanian