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 it works...

MVVM consists of three important parts—Model, View, and the ViewModel. The Model represents the data; the View is the actual UI, which displays the relevant parts of the model; and the ViewModel is the mechanism that hands out the required data to the view. A ViewModel basically exposes properties and commands, and maintains the relevant state of the view.

If we compare the MVVM pattern with a bike (as represented in the following screenshot), the bike Body is the View, the Fuel is the Model and the Engine of the bike is the ViewModel, which moves the View (bike body) by burning/using the Model (Fuel):

In our application, we used the DataContext to define the binding between the View and the ViewModel, which we then used to access the properties. If you now navigate to the MainWindow.xaml.cs file, you won't see any additional code except the constructor of the code-behind class.

In the MVVM pattern, our intention is to keep the code-behind file (MainWindow...