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)

Providing services

The job of the base classes and interfaces in our application framework are to encapsulate functionality that is commonly used by our View Models and data Models. When the required functionality is more complex, or when it involves particular resources, or external connections, we implement it in separate service, or manager classes. For the remainder of this book, we will refer to these as manager classes. In larger applications, these are typically provided in a separate project.

Encapsulating them in a separate project enables us to reuse the functionality from these classes in our other applications. Which classes we use in this project will depend on the requirements of the application that we're building, but it will often include classes that provide the ability to send emails, to access the end user's hard drive, to export data in various formats, or to manage global application state for example.

We will investigate a number of these classes...