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)

Modifying existing controls


When we find that the wide range of existing controls do not quite meet our needs, we might think that we need to create some new ones, as we would with other technologies. When using other UI languages, this might be the case, but with WPF, this is not necessarily correct, as it provides a number of ways to modify the existing controls to suit our requirements.

As we found out earlier, all classes that extend the FrameworkElement class have access to the framework's styling capabilities and those that extend the Control class can have their appearance totally changed through their ControlTemplate property. All of the existing WPF controls extend these base cases and so, possess these abilities.

In addition to these capabilities that enable us to change the look of the pre-existing WPF controls, we are also able to leverage the power of Attached Properties to add additional functionality to them too. In this section, we will investigate these different ways of modifying...