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)
Improving Application Performance

The performance of WPF applications, in general, is one of its biggest problems. The more visual layers that our rendered data objects and UIs contain, the more time it takes to render them, so we often need to maintain a balance between making our applications visually appealing and making them perform better.

This situation can be improved by running our WPF applications on more powerful computers. This explains why these applications are most prevalent in the financial industry. However, not everyone can afford to update all of their users' computers for this purpose.

Luckily, there are a number of ways in which we can improve the performance of our WPF applications, and we'll investigate them here. The art of improving application performance really comes down to making a lot of small improvements that together, add up to a noticeable...