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

Going the extra mile


Most privately developed applications are primarily functional, with little time and effort spent on design concerns and even less on usability. How many times have we seen applications that throw out a stack trace to the end user when an error occurs, or validation messages that highlight errors with the camel case code names for fields, rather than the labels used in the UI?

In a good application, the end user should never be presented with any code-based terminology. If we were writing an English based application, we wouldn't output error messages in Spanish, so why output them in C#? This can confuse the user and even alarm them in some cases.

How many times have you used an application that has an awkward process flow to perform each task, that involves far more mouse clicks than is necessary? This section is dedicated to avoiding these kinds of situations and suggests a number of ways of improving the usability of our applications.

Producing in-application help

In...