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)

Creating custom controls

When using WPF, we can generally create the UI that we want using the many techniques already discussed in this book. However, in the cases when we require a totally unique control with both a custom drawn appearance and custom functionality, then we may need to declare a custom control.

Developing custom controls is very different to creating UserControl elements and it can take some time to master this. To start with, we will need to add a new project of type WPF Custom Control Library to declare them in. Also, instead of having a XAML page and a code behind file, we only have the code file. At this point, you may be wondering where we define what our control should look like.

In fact, when defining a custom control, we declare our XAML in a separate file named Generic.xaml, which is added by Visual Studio when we add our controls project. To clarify, the XAML for all of the custom controls that we declare in this project will go into this file. This does not...