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)

Summary

In this chapter, we've investigated the best ways to track down our coding problems. We've looked at the various debug tracing outputs that we have access to and even discovered how to output our own custom trace information. We discovered that the exceptions that are thrown in WPF often hide their useful information in their InnerException properties. Finally, we found out a number of tips and tricks to use when trying to find errors with our data bound values.

The next chapter delves deeply into the subject of application frameworks and we get started on constructing our own. We find out about the benefit of base classes and discover alternative ways to implement our framework functionality. The chapter will finish off by investigating a variety of techniques to ensure that our applications maintain the essential Separation of Concerns that MVVM provides.