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)

Constructing a custom application framework

There will be different requirements for different components, but typically, the properties and functionality that we build into our Data Model base classes will be utilized and made more useful by our other base classes, so let's start by looking at the various Data Model base classes first.

One thing that we need to decide is whether we want any of our Data Model base classes to be generic or not. The difference can be subtle, but important. Imagine that we want to add some basic undo functionality into a base class. One way that we can achieve this would be to add an object into the base class that represents the unedited version of the Data Model. In an ordinary base class, it would look like this:

private object originalState; 
 
public object OriginalState 
{ 
  get { return originalState; } 
  private set { originalState = value; } 
} 

In a generic base class, it would look like this:

public abstract class BaseSynchronizableDataModel...