Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation - Second Edition

By : Sheridan Yuen
Book Image

Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation - Second Edition

By: Sheridan Yuen

Overview of this book

Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides a rich set of libraries and APIs for developers to create engaging user experiences. This book features a wide range of examples, from simple to complex, to demonstrate how to develop enterprise-grade applications with WPF. This updated second edition of Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation starts by introducing the benefits of using the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) software architectural pattern with WPF, then moves on, to explain how best to debug our WPF applications. It explores application architecture, and we learn how to build the foundation layer of our applications. It then demonstrates data binding in detail, and examines the various built-in WPF controls and a variety of ways in which we can customize them to suit our requirements. We then investigate how to create custom controls, for when the built-in functionality in WPF cannot be adapted for our needs. The latter half of the book deals with polishing our applications, using practical animations, stunning visuals and responsive data validation. It then moves on, to look at improving application performance, and ends with tutorials on several methods of deploying our applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

What is MVVM and how does it help?

Model-View-View Model (MVVM) is a software architectural pattern that was famously introduced by John Gossman on his blog back in 2005 and is now commonly used when developing WPF applications. Its main purpose is to provide a Separation of Concerns between the business model, the User Interface (UI), and the business logic. It does this by dividing them into three distinct types of core components: Models, Views, and View Models. Let's first take a look at how they are arranged and connected:

As we can see here, the View Models component sits between the Models and the Views and provides two-way access to each of them. It should be noted at this point that there should be no direct relationship between the Views and Models components and only loose connections between the other components. Let's now take a closer look at what each of these components represent.

Models

Unlike the other MVVM components, the Model constituent comprises of a...