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)

Making more efficient resources

When we reference our resources, we can either use a StaticResource or a DynamicResource. If you remember from Chapter 5, Using the Right Controls for the Job, a StaticResource will look up the value of the resource just once, which is comparative to a compile-time lookup. A DynamicResource will repeatedly look up the value of the resource each time it is requested, whether it has changed or not, like a runtime lookup.

For this reason, we should only ever use a DynamicResource if we really need to, and can attain much better performance by using the StaticResource class instead. If we find that we need to use a lot of DynamicResource references to access our resources, then we can refactor our code to data bind to properties in our StateManager class instead of the resources, in order to increase performance.

Another simple way to improve the performance of our resources is to reuse them. Instead of declaring them inline in the place that they are used...