Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By : Sheridan Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By: Sheridan Yuen

Overview of this book

Windows Presentation Foundation is rich in possibilities when it comes to delivering an excellent user experience. This book will show you how to build professional-grade applications that look great and work smoothly. We start by providing you with a foundation of knowledge to improve your workflow – this includes teaching you how to build the base layer of the application, which will support all that comes after it. We’ll also cover the useful details of data binding. Next, we cover the user interface and show you how to get the most out of the built-in and custom WPF controls. The final section of the book demonstrates ways to polish your applications, from adding practical animations and data validation to improving application performance. The book ends with a tutorial on how to deploy your applications and outlines potential ways to apply your new-found knowledge so you can put it to use right away.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using the right controls for performance


As was mentioned previously, there are usually several different ways of achieving the same functionality, or UI display when using WPF. Some ways will provide better performance than others. For example, we saw how some panels do more intensive layout work and therefore consume more CPU cycles and/or RAM than others.

Therefore, this is one area that we can investigate in order to make performance improvements. If we do not require the complex layout and resizing abilities of a Grid panel, then we can gain a performance improvement by utilizing a more efficient StackPanel or Canvas panel instead.

Another example could be that if we do not require the ability to select in a collection control, then we should use an ItemsControl element instead of a ListBox. While swapping one control will not make much of a performance improvement on its own, making this same swap in the DataTemplate of an item that will be displayed thousands of time will make a noticeable...