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)

Installing Windows applications

In days gone by, creating a Setup and Deployment project in Visual Studio was a confusing and complicated process. However, as with just about everything in the .NET Framework, successive updates over the years have resulted in ever improved creation methods for these projects.

The latest deployment technologies are simpler to use and provide an easily understandable method of performing the same steps as the earlier technologies. However, in older versions of Visual Studio, we might only have access to the older Visual Studio Installer project types, so let's first investigate the standard Setup Project.

Installing Windows applications

After adding a Setup Project to the solution, a page opens up showing the filesystem on the target computer. In this File System Editor page, we can specify what we would like to install and where. The page is divided into two, with a tree view of the folders to be installed on the users' computers on the left and their folder contents on the...