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)

Going the extra mile

Most privately developed applications are primarily functional, with little time and effort spent on design concerns and even less on usability. How many times have we seen applications that throw out a stack trace to the end user when an error occurs, or validation messages that highlight errors with the camel case code names for fields, rather than the labels used in the UI?

In a good application, the end user should never be presented with any code-based terminology. If we were writing an English based application, we wouldn't output error messages in Spanish, so why output them in C#? This can confuse the user and even alarm them in some cases.

How many times have you used an application that has an awkward process flow to perform each task, that involves far more mouse clicks than is necessary? This section is dedicated to avoiding these kinds of situations and suggests a number of ways of improving the usability of our applications.

Producing in-application...