Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By : Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By: 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 (13 chapters)

Virtualizing collections


When we display large numbers of items in our collection controls, it can negatively affect the application's performance. This is because the layout system will create a layout container, such as a ComboBoxItem in the case of a ComboBox for example, for every item in the data bound collection. As only a small subset of the complete number of items is displayed at any one time, we can take advantage of virtualization to improve the situation.

UI virtualization defers the generation and layout of these item containers until each item is actually visible in the relevant collection control, often saving on large amounts of resources. We can take advantage of virtualization without doing anything at all if we use ListBox or ListView controls to display our collections, as they use it by default.

Virtualization can also be enabled in ComboBox, ContextMenu and TreeView controls, although it will have to be done manually. When using a TreeView control, we can enable virtualization...