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)

Turning your attention to future projects

You could apply the concepts and ideas from this book to other areas and continue to experiment and explore their effect in these new areas. For example, we've learned about Adorner objects, so you could use that new-found knowledge to implement some visual feedback for the common drag and drop functionality in the main window's adorner layer.

You could then further extend this idea, using what you've discovered about Attached Properties, and completely encapsulate this drag and drop functionality, enabling the developers that utilize your application framework to make use of this feature in a property-based manner.

For example, you could create a DragDropProperties class that declared Attached Properties, such as IsDragSource, IsDragTarget, DragEffects, DragDropType, and DropCommand, and could be extended by your relevant Attached Property classes, such as a ListBoxProperties class.

You could then declare a BaseDragDropManager...