Best way to learn WPF

I am interested in learning WPF, especially the fancy special effects/boom explosions side of it. Anyone have any good (perferably online) resources you can recommend?

Adam Nathan's book is good (WPF Unleashed).  As for online resources, http://windowsclient.net is a good place to start.

Pro WPF was pretty good for a book that hits on all pieces of WPF. There's a chapter on 3D if that's what you're after. There's also one on animation.

Just don't expect to learn this stuff in  a week because there is a heck of a lot of stuff to cover. I don't even think you can jump chapters because at best you need to understand layout (the visual tree), routed events, dependency properties and commands, then move onto 3D.

WPF is not popfly, powerful yes, but you do need to invest a lot of time in it. You may want to have a look at this (with the source available on codeplex)

I really like Petzold's book, but it's thick and designed to be read cover to cover, while typing in the examples, so may not be the best choice if you're only casually interested.

I really didn't write much .NET code yet for this project. Most of my work past three weeks is in C. But the UI/DB stuff will be in a high level language. I like C#/.NET the most.

But really rather use Qt, but Qt isn't as well binded with .NET. My main beef with WPF is everything I have written so far is ridiculously portable, it would almost be a shame to ruin this with a UI that is hopelessly stuck on Windows.

I could do Java, I guess (Java has really good Qt bindings). And Java has Hadoop, which is a big plus for me right now, on the server side. Since plugins will have to work on both the client and the server side, I have to go with all .NET or all Java.

It's a tough decision all round. I'm going to look in WPF some more tomorrow. If it's too difficult I will look into Qt/Jambi and go with Java.

It's a bit frustrating not being able to say what exactly I am doing. If I did I bet most people here will get the strange mix of requirements ranging from WPF to Mono.Addins/MEF to Hadoop to C.

Is there going to be a concise book, e.g. in the O'Reilly Pocket Reference series? So many of these programming books are full of waffle.

CSMR said:

Is there going to be a concise book, e.g. in the O'Reilly Pocket Reference series? So many of these programming books are full of waffle.

Personally I'v used the Adam Nathan and Petzold books, and the MacDonald one (linky by spivonious above).

None contain any waffle in them.