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)

Encapsulating common functionality


Probably the most commonly used interface in any WPF application would be the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, as it is required to correctly implement data binding. By providing an implementation of this interface in our base class, we can avoid having to repeatedly implement it in every single View Model class. It is therefore, a great candidate for inclusion in our base class. There are a number of different ways to implement it depending on our requirements, so let's take a look at the most basic first:

public virtual event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; 
 
protected virtual void NotifyPropertyChanged(string propertyName) 
{ 
  if (PropertyChanged != null)  
    PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 
} 

In all forms of this implementation, we first need to declare the PropertyChanged event. This is the event that will be used to notify the various binding sources and targets...