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)

Using the right controls for performance

As was mentioned previously, there are usually several different ways of achieving the same functionality, or UI display, when using WPF. Some ways will provide better performance than others. For example, we saw how some panels do more intensive layout work and therefore, consume more CPU cycles and/or RAM than others.

Therefore, this is one area that we can investigate in order to make performance improvements. If we do not require the complex layout and resizing abilities of a Grid panel, then we can gain a performance improvement by utilizing a more efficient StackPanel or Canvas panel instead.

Another example could be that if we do not require the ability to select in a collection control, then we should use an ItemsControl element instead of a ListBox. While swapping one control will not make much of a performance improvement on its own, making this same swap in the DataTemplate of an item that will be displayed thousands of times will make...