Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Summary

This chapter has covered the most important concepts and capabilities needed by a beginning XAML developer. However, there is still much to know to take complete advantage of what XAML can do.

Chapter 13 goes into more detail on using XAML in Windows 8. If your preferred platform for XAML will be Windows 8, that chapter should be your next step.

If you will be doing WPF or Silverlight development, then you will need to turn to other resources to go more in-depth on XAML. Some of the topics that you should learn next include:

• Additional panels: WrapPanel, Canvas
• Additional controls: TabControl, DataGrid, TreeView, etc.
• Transforms
• Animation
• VisualStateManager
• Using the visual designers in Visual Studio and Expression Blend

Later, you may need to cover some advanced concepts. If you will be writing XAML frameworks, for example, you will need to be quite familiar with the dependency property system, attached properties, and other internal aspects of XAML.