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

Data binding basics


In WPF, we use the Binding class to create our bindings. In general, it is fair to say that every binding will contain four constituent parts. The first is the binding source; typically, this will be one of our View Models. The second is the path to the property from the source object that we would like to data bind to.

The third is the binding target; this will typically be a UI control. The fourth is the path to the property of the binding target that we want to bind to. Therefore, if one of our bindings do not work, it is most likely that one of these four things has not been set correctly.

It is important to stress that the target property will typically be from a UI control, because there is a data binding rule that states that the binding target must be a Dependency Property. The properties of most UI controls are Dependency Properties and so, this rule simply enforces that data normally travels in the direction from our View Model data sources to the binding target...