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)

Data templates


We've already seen a number of simple examples of the DataTemplate, but they are such an important part of WPF that we're going to have a much more thorough look at them now. In short, we use a DataTemplate to define how we want particular data objects to be rendered in the UI.

If we were to data bind a particular type of object to a UI control without providing a DataTemplate for it, the WPF Framework would not know how to display it. In these cases, the best job that it can do is to display a string representation of it.

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Users}" /> 

It achieves this by calling the object.ToString method on the data object and setting that value to the Text property of a TextBlock, which it uses to display the object. If this method has not been overridden in the object's class, this will result in the name of the type of the object being displayed in its place.

Knowing that the WPF Framework will call the ToString method on our data objects...