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)

Data binding basics

In WPF, we use the Binding class to create our bindings. In general, it is fair to say that every binding will contain four constituent parts. Let's take a look at them now:

  • The first is the binding source; typically, this will be one of our View Models.
  • The second is the path to the property from the source object that we would like to data bind to.
  • The third is the binding target; this will typically be a UI control.
  • The fourth is the path to the property of the binding target that we want to data bind to.

If one of our bindings does not work, it is most likely that one of these four things has not been set correctly.

It is important to stress that the target property will typically be from a UI control, because there is a data binding rule that states that the binding target must be a Dependency Property. The properties of most UI controls are Dependency Properties and so, this rule simply enforces that data normally travels in the direction from our View...