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)

Shrinking data objects

Quite often, our applications will have fairly sizable data objects, with dozens, or even hundreds, of properties. If we were to load all of the properties for each data object when we have thousands of them, our application would slow down and possibly even run out of memory.

We might think that we can save on RAM by simply not populating all of the property values, but if we use the same classes, we'll soon find that even the default or empty values for these properties may consume too much memory. In general, and with a few exceptions, unset CLR properties take the same amount of RAM as set properties.

If our data Model object has a very large number of properties, one solution would be to break it down into much smaller pieces. For example, we could create a number of smaller, sub product classes, such as ProductTechnicalSpecification, ProductDescription, ProductDimension, ProductPricing, and so on.

Rather than building one giant View to edit the whole...