Book Image

Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook

By : Pavel Yosifovich
Book Image

Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook

By: Pavel Yosifovich

Overview of this book

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides developers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.WPF has become the leading technology for developing rich client applications on the Windows platform, packed with features and capabilities. However, WPF is big; in fact, it's huge, causing a steep learning curve for the beginner and even for those already using some WPF features.Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook provides clear recipes for common WPF tasks. It includes detailed explanations and code examples for customizing and enhancing the basic scenarios, while gaining a deep understanding of WPF mechanics and capabilities.WPF is different and requires a different mind-set and approach. This book provides recipes and insights not only in its design but also its practical implementation details.Starting from the foundations of WPF, such as dependency properties and XAML, the book touches on all major WPF aspects, such as controls and layout, resources, and digs deep into its unprecedented data binding capabilities.The book shows data and control templates in action, which allow full customizations of displayed data and controls in a declarative way. Supported by styles and resources makes data binding all the more powerful. The Model View View-Model pattern is presented as an effective way of maximizing decoupling of components, while providing an elegant way of expanding applications while maintaining a tight grip on complexity.The later parts discuss custom elements and controls ñ the ultimate customization mechanism, and looks at multithreading issues, and how .NET 4.5 task parallelism features can enhance application performance.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


WPF has a very impressive graphic stack. That's one of the obvious selling points of the technology, as it's very visual and immediately recognizable. WPF's graphic capabilities range from simple 2D to arbitrarily complex 3D, with the typical integration we come to expect from WPF; everything can be interacted with anything – a 3D scene can be animating inside a button and that button still behaves like a button.

WPF also provides a powerful, declarative, animation engine. This makes using animations easy, removing the need to use timers, do refresh updates, and other low level tasks that are typical with other graphic frameworks.

This chapter explores some of WPF's graphic and animation capabilities. Missing from the chapter is discussion of WPF's 3D graphic support; this is simply beyond the scope of this book, as it must maintain a reasonable number of pages. 3D is a complex topic in itself; WPF makes using 3D relatively easy. Other sources have discussions on 3D in general...