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

Creating a lightweight custom element


Custom controls provide a way to create a user interface based on XAML elements. Sometimes, however, a more complex UI is required, that cannot be easily achieved by XAML alone, or where low level control is desired. In such cases, we can create a lightweight element, deriving from FrameworkElement that does its own drawing without creating any particular element. This makes the control consume less memory and WPF layout logic does not need to consider many elements.

In this recipe, we'll take a look at the way to implement such lightweight elements.

Getting ready

Make sure Visual Studio is up and running.

How to do it...

We'll create a simple bar graph control to demonstrate the ability to draw in a more "manual" fashion.

  1. Create a new WPF application project named CH10.CustomRendering.

  2. Add a new class named BarGraph that derives from FrameworkElement. This class will hold an array of values to show as a bar graph.

  3. Add a dependency property named Values to the...