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)

Debugging data bound values

So far, we have seen that we can utilize a number of sources of information to help with tracking down the causes of our problems. However, what about actual debugging? In other GUI languages, we can add breakpoints at various locations in our code and watch our values changing as we step through our code. While we can also do this with WPF applications, it is not always so obvious where to put our breakpoints to ensure that program execution will hit them.

If you remember from the previous chapter, the CommandManager.RequerySuggested event is raised when the CommandManager detects a change in the UI that could reflect on whether a command could execute or not. Well, it turns out that two of the conditions that the CommandManager looks out for is when the application window is either activated or deactivated and we can take advantage of this to help us when debugging. Note that the application window is deactivated when the user moves focus from it and is reactivated...