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)

Altering default behavior

The developers of the ItemsControl class gave it a particular default behavior. They thought that any objects that extended the UIElement class would have their own UI container and so, should be displayed directly, rather than allowing them to be templated in the usual way.

There is a method named IsItemItsOwnContainer in the ItemsControl class, which is called by the WPF Framework, to determine whether an item in the Items collection is its own item container or not. Let's first take a look at the source code of this method:

public bool IsItemItsOwnContainer(object item) 
{ 
  return IsItemItsOwnContainerOverride(item); 
} 

Note that internally, this method just calls the IsItemItsOwnContainerOverride method, returning its value unchanged. Let's take a look at the source code of that method now:

protected virtual bool IsItemItsOwnContainerOverride(object item) 
{ 
  return (item is UIElement); 
} 

Here, we see two things: The first is the default...