Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Need to ensure you can always create the best Windows apps regardless of platform? What you need are solutions to the biggest issues you can face, so you can always ensure you’re making the right choices and creating the best apps you can. The book starts with recipes that will help you set up the integrated development environment before you go ahead and design the user interface. You will learn how to use the MVVM design pattern together with data binding, as well as how to work with data in different file formats. Moving on, you will explore techniques to add animations and graphics to your application, and enable your solution to work with multimedia content. You will also see how to use sensors, such as an accelerometer and a compass, as well as obtain the current GPS location. You will make your application ready to work with Internet-based scenarios, such as composing e-mails or downloading files, before finally testing the project and submitting it to the Windows Store. By the end of the book, you will have a market-ready application compatible across different Windows devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introducing bindings and commands


When the view model is properly configured for a page, it is necessary to indicate how the values of properties should be shown in the user interface, such as where a particular string value should be presented. Of course, it is possible to use the data binding mechanism not only to bind textual values, but also to support other types, such as colors.

What is more, the data binding mechanism supports commands. They allow you to place C# code to handle a particular scenario (such as clicking on a button) in a view model class, not in a code-behind file. In the presented MVVM configuration, the usage of commands requires the RelayCommand class, as presented in the previous recipe.

As an example, you will create a simple page with a text block and a button. In the text block, the invitation is shown as Hello, Guest or Hello, Marcin, depending on whether the user is logged in. The button content (Log in or Log out) as well as its background (green or red) also...