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

Using behaviors


Triggers have inherent limitations; new trigger types cannot be created, nor new trigger actions. These decisions made by the WPF designers are somewhat arbitrary, as there may be useful triggers and actions that could have been created by developers. It may be somewhat justified, however, preventing abuse of this feature that may degrade performance (for heavy duty triggers or actions). Still, abuse is possible almost everywhere that software exists.

Whether this decision is justified or not is a matter of opinion; it is a fact nonetheless.

A possible solution to the extensibility problem is to write a similar open-ended mechanism and expose it through attached properties. This is exactly what was done by the Expression Blend team that wanted to expose new trigger and action types to be provided as a reusable library. They created a trigger/action mechanism that is packaged as two assemblies, one of which provides the core capabilities, and the other providing a set of built...