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

Implementing a basic MVVM application


The MVC, MVP, and MVVM patterns comprise mostly the same parts: a model, which is the data, a view (or views) that display the data in some meaningful way and provide user interaction, and a third part that is somehow responsible for the logic behind the interactions of view and data. The exact differences between MVC and MVP are not that important (you can find a lot on these topics on the Web). MVVM could be considered a special case of MVP, where data binding is used to connect the View with the ViewModel in a very loose way. This is especially favorable for XAML-based applications, where data binding is both declarative and powerful. In this recipe, we'll move closer to MVVM by taking the previous recipe, Using routed commands, and "moving" it towards MVVM.

Getting ready

In Visual Studio, open the CH07.RoutedCommands project (from the previous recipe). We'll make changes to this project to make it more MVVM-like.

How to do it...

We'll refactor the image...