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 custom shape


Shapes are (mostly) simple elements deriving from the Shape abstract base class, which derives directly from FrameworkElement; shapes providing an inherent graphical representation that can easily be filled, stroked and stretched. Shapes are not controls – they have no template associated with them. They are, however, full elements, providing support for the full range of capabilities, including participation in layout, hit testing, and the multitude of properties and events that make working with these entities as easy as any control.

We can create new shapes by deriving from Shape, providing a new graphical representation, and taking advantage of the functionality provided by the base Shape class.

Getting ready

Make sure Visual Studio is up and running.

How to do it...

We'll create a ring shape element, demonstrating the steps necessary to create custom Shape classes that fit naturally with the rest of WPF, just as the built-in shapes do:

  1. Create a new WPF application...