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)

Virtualizing collections

When we display large numbers of items in our collection controls, it can negatively affect the application's performance. This is because the layout system will create a layout container, such as a ComboBoxItem in the case of a ComboBox, for example, for every item in the data bound collection. As only a small subset of the complete number of items is displayed at any one time, we can take advantage of virtualization to improve the situation.

UI virtualization defers the generation and layout of these item containers until each item is actually visible in the relevant collection control, often saving on large amounts of resources. We can take advantage of virtualization without doing anything at all if we use ListBox or ListView controls to display our collections, as they use it by default.

Virtualization can also be enabled in ComboBox, ContextMenu, and TreeView controls, although it will have to be done manually. When using a TreeView control, we can...