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

Introduction

Every UI Framework must provide the standard controls to design the application UI and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is one of them. WPF provides a set of standard controls and UI elements such as TextBlock, TextBox, Button, Image, various shapes, ProgressBar, Slider, various menus, Toolbar, ListBox, ComboBox, DataGrid, and more.

As you can see from the following diagram, UI controls can be of two types—ItemsControl and ContentControl, which inherit from Control class. All the panels available in WPF share the same base class Panel. The Control and Panel class have the base FrameworkElement, which again inherits from the UIElement. It has the base class as the DependencyObject and the superbase as the Object:

Every control has some common set of properties exposed. This includes FontFamily, FontSize, FontStyle, Foreground, Background, BorderBrush, BorderThickness, and more. Every framework element exposes additional properties such as Width, MaxWidth, MinWidth...