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

Calling Win32 APIs from WPF applications

Windows Presentation Foundation and Win32 interpolation can work as different approaches. You can either host a Win32 application in a WPF application, a WPF application in a Win32 application, or call a Win32 API from WPF by importing the specified system DLL. These are often useful when you have already invested a lot in Win32 applications and now you would like to build a rich WPF application by utilizing the existing code.

In this recipe, we will learn how to call a Win32 API from a WPF. We will use a simple example to launch a browser window and then activate/refresh the browser window from our WPF code.