Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By : Sheridan Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By: Sheridan Yuen

Overview of this book

Windows Presentation Foundation is rich in possibilities when it comes to delivering an excellent user experience. This book will show you how to build professional-grade applications that look great and work smoothly. We start by providing you with a foundation of knowledge to improve your workflow – this includes teaching you how to build the base layer of the application, which will support all that comes after it. We’ll also cover the useful details of data binding. Next, we cover the user interface and show you how to get the most out of the built-in and custom WPF controls. The final section of the book demonstrates ways to polish your applications, from adding practical animations and data validation to improving application performance. The book ends with a tutorial on how to deploy your applications and outlines potential ways to apply your new-found knowledge so you can put it to use right away.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Layering visuals


So far, we've just looked at simple redefinitions of the standard controls, by altering shapes, sizes, borders and other common properties. However, we can do much more than that with WPF. Before continuing with this section, it is important to know that the more visuals that each control is comprised of, the longer it will take to render them and so, this can negatively affect performance.

As such, it's important not to overdo the visual aspect of our controls if our application will be run on slow, old computers. Conversely, if we know that our end users will have plenty of RAM and/or graphics cards, then we can go the extra distance and develop visually stunning controls. Let's look at some techniques that we can use to improve the look of our controls.

Throwing shadows

One of the easiest ways to make our UI elements pop out of the screen is to add a shadow to them. Each control has an Effect property that is inherited from the UIElement class. We can set an object of type...