Charles Petzold

If all goes according to plan, in one week, on May 17, 2012, you will be able to purchase a preview ebook of Programming Windows, 6th edition, for just $10. For that one-time payment of $10, you will also get the second preview ebook a couple months from now, and the final ebook later this fall.

But this terrific offer will only be available for two weeks. After May 31st, the price goes up to $20, and if you insist on waiting even longer, the price keeps going up. Complete details are here on the Microsoft Press blog.

Sorry I can't give you a link to buy the book right now, but stay tuned.

This first preview ebook is based on the Consumer Preview release of Windows 8. The book is over 250 pages in length with 7 chapters that cover the basics of writing Metro style applications for Windows 8 using the Windows Runtime with C# and XAML We suspect that the final book will be about 3 times the length of this first preview.

Here are the chapters so far:

Chapter 1, Markup and Code, shows how to display simple text and bitmaps using XAML or code, and how to play movies and sound.

Chapter 2, XAML Syntax, goes more deeply into XAML property elements, gradient brushes, formatted text, XAML resources, styles, and data binding.

Chapter 3, Basic Event Handling, explores routed event handling, dealing with size and orientation changes, and using the Timer and CompositionTarget.Rendering for display updates and animation.

Chapter 4, Presentation with Panels, covers Border, StackPanel, ScrollViewer, Canvas, UserControl, and libraries, and features a program that displays the Windows Runtime class hierarchy starting at DependencyObject, and a complete illustrated ebook of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten.

Chapter 5, Control Interaction, gets into the Grid, buttons, Slider, TextBox, and defining dependency properties. Sample programs include a color-scrolling app and a keypad app.

Chapter 6, WinRT and MVVM, demonstrates the WinRT features useful for implementing a model-view-viewmodel architecture, specifically the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, data binding, and the ICommand interface.

Chapter 7, Building an Application, features a Metro style version of XamlCruncher, an application that lets you interactively edit XAML files, see what they create, and save them to files. Along the way, this chapter explores the application bar, popup dialogs, retaining user settings in isolated storage, and doing file I/O with asynchronous operations.

The 7 chapters contain a total of 79 complete Metro style applications. All the source code will be downloadable when the book becomes available, and will also include all 79 projects converted into C++/CX.

We figure that when you spend $10 for a book, you should get your money's worth (and then some).