Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Need to ensure you can always create the best Windows apps regardless of platform? What you need are solutions to the biggest issues you can face, so you can always ensure you’re making the right choices and creating the best apps you can. The book starts with recipes that will help you set up the integrated development environment before you go ahead and design the user interface. You will learn how to use the MVVM design pattern together with data binding, as well as how to work with data in different file formats. Moving on, you will explore techniques to add animations and graphics to your application, and enable your solution to work with multimedia content. You will also see how to use sensors, such as an accelerometer and a compass, as well as obtain the current GPS location. You will make your application ready to work with Internet-based scenarios, such as composing e-mails or downloading files, before finally testing the project and submitting it to the Windows Store. By the end of the book, you will have a market-ready application compatible across different Windows devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Windows Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Binding with a value converter


In the previous recipes, you learned how to adjust the user interface based on the values of properties defined within the view model class. However, you could ask yourself these simple questions: What should I do to show or hide some elements using the data binding mechanism?  Do I need to define a separate property of the Visibility type for each element with such a feature? Of course, you could solve this problem in the mentioned way. However, there is a much better approach available if you use value converters. They allow you to convert a particular value into another. For instance, you can define a value converter that could convert a Boolean value into the Visibility enumeration value. You will learn how to do this in the current recipe.

As an example, you will create a simple toggle mechanism that will hide or show the text block after you click on the button. Of course, the data binding mechanism together with the value converter will be used for this...