Development for mobile devices, even for a single platform (iOS, Android, Windows), can be a difficult thing--every device has a slightly different form factor, and increasingly we’re seeing the same programs running on things from phones to tablets to laptops and desktops. Good toolkits are essential and with them comes the requirement to help developers use them. Thus, books like this one are written.

As in many device toolkits, there is a distinction between declarative portions--describing (for instance) layout, icons, and other relatively static portions of the application--and the more programmatic, dynamic portions. This book is mostly about the declarative side, written for Windows platforms in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), an Extensible Markup Language (XML) for describing layout, button design, and similar things, although there is some C# code that goes with the examples.

There are 11 chapters in three parts--starting with an introductory chapter and a rather odd chapter on “Software Craftsmanship,” which focuses on “SOLID” principles and includes sections like “Meet the Team.”

The second part, “Laying the Groundwork,” covers domain-driven design, design patterns, unit testing, and exception handling.

The third part, on the user interface (UI), concentrates more on things like the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) user interface layer, the Windows Phone UI, the Windows UI, and deploying an application.

Despite the notional coverage of topics like “Design Patterns,” the focus is always Windows UI programming. For instance, the “Design Patterns” chapter covers mostly the model-view-viewmodel (MVVM) pattern and doesn’t really cover design patterns and anti-patterns at all.

There are many pages with badly rendered grayscale images. If these were interesting, informative, or inspiring, it would be one thing, but most are less than helpful. For instance, there’s a half-page illustration that shows the Visual Studio install panel (which only takes half of the half-page) that’s close to unreadable. There are a few lines of text, but most of the page is blank--and this is a “design pattern” that’s repeated too often. My favorite is a page with six lines of text and a layout in grayscale of the “Background and Accent Colors”--each of which is a grayscale block with the name in it. In my copy, orange and teal seem to be the same color. A few pages on is a listing of font sizes--and in this case where displaying the fonts in monochrome to show their relative sizes might be helpful, there’s no illustration. Source code is available for download.

It can be fun to go through and find illustrations that don’t need to be illustrations (such as a bit-mapped picture of some text), but there are enough so the process palls quickly. >The index is just over four pages long.

I’m not entirely sure who this book is aimed at. Professional programmers will find it less than informative; the descriptions are informal and rarely descriptive enough. Designers will probably find it too programmer oriented.

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