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...

When you launch a WPF application in debug mode, the floating toolbar also gets loaded on the screen, which allows you to easily select the element in the running instance of the application and inspect its Visual Element in Live Visual Tree.

The floating toolbar contains four buttons—Go to Live Visual Tree, Enable Selection, Display layout adorners, and Track focused element, as shown in the following screenshot:

In MainWindow.xaml, we have added just the Button control inside StackPanel, but when you see it on Live Visual Tree, you will notice that the Button control consists of other UI elements to represent the control. It contains a Border, a ContentPresenter, and a TextBlock to visualize the Button content:

Like this, each UI control consists of one or more UI elements that are only visible in a Visual Tree and can be inspected via Live Visual Tree when the debugger is attached to the application.

Please note that this is how the XAML controls actually render...