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)

Investigating the built-in controls


There are a wide range of controls included in the .NET Framework. They cover most common scenarios and it is rare that we will need to create our own controls in a typical form-based application. All of the UI controls tend to have their functionality built up from a large number of common base classes.

All controls will share the same core-level base classes that provide the core-level functionalities and then a number of derived framework-level classes that provide the functionality that is associated with the WPF Framework, such as data binding, styling and templating. Let's take a look at an example.

Inheriting framework abilities

As with the base classes in our application framework, the built-in WPF controls also have an inheritance hierarchy, with each successive base class offering some additional functionality. Let's look at the Button class as an example. Here is the inheritance hierarchy of the Button control:

System.Object 
  System.Windows...