Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By : Sheridan Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

By: Sheridan 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 (19 chapters)
Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Styling applications consistently


One of the easiest ways to make our applications stand out is to make them look unique. This can be achieved by defining custom styles for the controls that we use in it. However, if we decide to style our controls, it is essential that we style all of the controls that we use, as a half styled application can often look worse than an application that merely uses the default styles.

It is therefore absolutely essential that we design our application control styles consistently, in order to attain a professional look for our application. In this section, we'll discuss a number of tips and tricks to help us to implement these application styles.

Overriding default control styles

When providing custom styles for our application controls, this typically requires us to define a new ControlTemplate element for each of them. As these can often be very large, it is customary to declare them in a separate resource file and merge it with the application resources in...