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)

Combining controls


When we need to arrange a number of existing controls in a particular way, we typically use a UserControl object. This is why we normally use this type of control to build our Views. However, when we need to build a reusable control, such as an address control, we tend to separate these from our Views, by declaring them in a Controls folder and namespace within our Views project.

When declaring these reusable controls, it is customary to define Dependency Properties in the code behind and as long as there is no business-related functionality in the control, it is also ok to use the code behind to handle events. If the control is business-related, then we can use a View Model, as we do with normal Views. Let's take a look at an example of an address control.

<UserControl x:Class=
  "CompanyName.ApplicationName.Views.Controls.AddressControl" 
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx...