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)

Leveraging the power of hardware rendering

As we've already learned, the visuals that WPF can output, while beautiful, can be very CPU-intensive, and we often need to bear this in mind when designing our Views. However, rather than compromising our designs, we can offload the intensive rendering processes to the host computer's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instead.

While WPF will default to utilize its software rendering pipeline, it is also able to take advantage of a hardware rendering pipeline. This hardware pipeline leverages features of Microsoft DirectX, as long as the host PC has DirectX version 7, or higher, installed. Furthermore, if the version of DirectX that is installed is version 9 or higher, increased performance improvements will be seen.

The WPF Framework looks at the graphics hardware that is installed on the computer that it is running on and puts it into one of three categories, depending on its features, such as video RAM, shaders, and support for multi...