The chapter covers the new concepts in WPF which is super because if you can understand the important ideas (what Ayende calls the model) which a technology is built on then you can ignore the details until you need them.

Quick sample chapter review: I’ve not spent any time at all with WPF and thought I should at least take a little peak under the kimono. In this one chapter – I feel that I got enough background to understand the high level architecture of WPF/XAML. Strongly recommended.

In the discussion of Dependency Properties – I was struck by their similarity to what’s known in computer science as environmental acquisition. This is the concept that objects inherit attributes based not on their type hierarchy but on their containment hierarchy.

I’m curious about why Microsoft decided to overload the (already massively overloaded) word “Dependency” rather than using an already common term which describes exactly what is going on. It’s kind of like adding a BinaryTree implementation to System.Collections and calling it FastSet.

Personally – I think that AcquisitionProperty or AcquiredProperty is much clearer – even if you don’t know what acquisition is – once you do – you have a clear term to describe exactly what’s going on. I realise that Dependancy Properties provide more than just Acquisition – but really – “Dependancy”?

I first came across the concept of Aquisition when I was working with Zope back in 2001. Jim Fulton did a presentation at the Python conference that year called Acquisition Algebra which contained some of the background to the concept. John Udell also wrote a great article on this powerful feature.