Book Image

Windows Presentation Foundation Development Cookbook

Book Image

Windows Presentation Foundation Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft's development tool for building rich Windows client user experiences that incorporate UIs, media, and documents. With the updates in .NET 4.7, Visual Studio 2017, C# 7, and .NET Standard 2.0, WPF has taken giant strides and is now easier than ever for developers to use. If you want to get an in-depth view of WPF mechanics and capabilities, then this book is for you. The book begins by teaching you about the fundamentals of WPF and then quickly shows you the standard controls and the layout options. It teaches you about data bindings and how to utilize resources and the MVVM pattern to maintain a clean and reusable structure in your code. After this, you will explore the animation capabilities of WPF and see how they integrate with other mechanisms. Towards the end of the book, you will learn about WCF services and explore WPF's support for debugging and asynchronous operations. By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of WPF and will know how to build resilient applications.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
2
Using WPF Standard Controls

Introduction

WPF provides a proper layout and positioning to provide interactive, user-friendly applications with a suitable container element that helps you to position the child UI elements. The parent container is usually the contents of a window. You can place child level containers and elements with proper margins, paddings, and alignments.

In WPF, Panel is the base class that provides layout support. There are plenty of derived panels in WPF that help you to create simple to complex layouts and all of them are defined in the System.Windows.Controls namespace.

All Panel elements support sizing and positioning defined by the FrameworkElement. You can set the Height, Width, Margin, Padding, HorizontalAlignment, and VerticalAlignment properties to design your UI. The following diagram describes these important properties, which you will use everywhere:

A panel also exposes other properties such as Background, Children, ZIndex, and more. Since a window can contain only one child, a...