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...

The first control added in the StackPanel is a very basic label, which has plain text as its Content property. The second Label control also contains plain text, but has various formatting (such as, FontWeight, Foreground, and FontStyle) applied to it to give it a bold, italic, and red color look to its style.

As the Label control derives from System.Windows.Controls.ContentControl, it also supports adding other controls to its content. The third label added to the UI is a little different than the previous two examples. It not only contains text, but also other controls, such as StackPanel, TextBlock, and a Rectangle, owing to its Content property.

In the preceding example, for the third label, the TextBlock control is used to hold the actual text content, and StackPanel is used as a panel control to hold both the TextBlock and the Rectangle.

A point to remember is that Label is heavier than a TextBlock. So, when you need to render a plain text on the UI, prefer TextBlock...