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

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to create your first custom control, which will contain a text input box and a button to build a search control. At the end, we will add it to the application window:

  1. Once the project has been created, right-click on the project, from Solution Explorer, and follow Add | New Item... from the context menu entries. A new dialog window will pop up on the screen.

  1. Inside the Add New Item dialog window, expand the Installed | Visual C# | WPF tree item, from the left navigation panel, and select Custom Control (WPF) from the right screen:
  1. Give the custom control a name (let's say, SearchControl.cs) and click Add to create it. This will create the class file named SearchControl.cs inside the project, and a folder (named Themes) containing a Generic.xaml file.
  2. Open the Generic.xaml file, which will contain a Style for the custom control that we created. This gets generated automatically by the Visual Studio IDE, while creating the custom...