Vista - Examples I have do not seem to work :(

I am looking for some straightforward examples of the following. I have
Programming WPF by O'Reilly and Professional WinFX Beta from Wrox but some
things must have changed or I have failed to understand them properly.

Using SystemParameters. For example, I have a grid column that needs to be
the width of a scrollbar. According to Programming WPF by O'Reilly you do
it like this:

<FrameworkElement Grid.Column="15" x:Name="dummyColumn"
Width="{DynamicResource {x:Static SystemParameters.ScrollWidthKey}}" />

However this just results in:

Error 1 MarkupExtension requires a ParserContext before
ProvideValue() can be called. C:\Documents and Settings\Nik\My
Documents\Visual Studio
2005\Projects\WindowsApplication1\WindowsApplication1\Window1.xaml 1
1 WindowsApplication1

I can just do Width="17" as a workaround but it is extremely unsatisfactory
because it breaks the second the user does something that affects the
scrollbar width from the Windows default.

SharedSizeGroups - I got these working without any difficult but they seem
to slow things down A LOT. When I switch from xaml to design view in VS2005
you can sit and watch the columns moving around until they are all lined up
properly, it takes a number of seconds. This is two medium sized grids
which share column widths as they are stacked on top of each other. The
same thing happens with the compiled version.

Tables:

None of the examples in any of the books that I have nor examples that I
have found through Google work, VS2005 spews errors at me. A working
example of a simple table would be wonderful.
I cannot work out how to include external xaml files. For example say I
have:
<Window.>
<Menu.>

Nik Coughlin wrote:
> I am looking for some straightforward examples of the following. I have
> Programming WPF by O'Reilly and Professional WinFX Beta from Wrox but some
> things must have changed or I have failed to understand them properly.
>

Definitely check out http://www.sellsbrothers.com/writing/avbook/ before
really digging in here. The Sells O'Reilly book was written for the
beta1 release and is quite out of date in a number of syntactical areas.
However Mr. Sells has been nice enough to post several pages of
changes from beta -> September CTP and September CTP -> November CTP.
Even more valuable, he's updated all of the sample code from the book.
This will probably solve a number of the difficulties you've been having.

Jason