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)

Moving away from the ordinary


The vast majority of business applications in general, look fairly ordinary, with various form pages containing banks of standard rectangular form fields. Visually appealing applications on the other hand, stand out from the crowd. Therefore, in order to create visually appealing applications, we need to move away from the ordinary.

Whether this means simply adding control templates with rounded corners for our controls, or something more is up to you. There are many different ways that we can enhance the look of our controls and we'll take a look at a number of these ideas in this section. Let's start with a refection effect that is best suited for use with logos, or startup or background images.

Casting reflections

All FrameworkElement-derived classes have a RenderTransform property that we can utilize to transform their rendered output in a variety of ways. A ScaleTransform element enables us to scale each object in both horizontal and vertical directions. One...