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)

Varying levels of validation

One thing that is not addressed by either of the .NET validation interfaces is the ability to either turn validation on or off, or to set varying levels of validation. This can be useful in several different scenarios, such as having different Views to edit different properties of a data Model object.

An example of this might be having a View that enables users to update the security settings of a User object, where we want to validate that each property has a value, but only for the properties that are currently displayed in the View. After all, there is no point in informing the user that a certain field must be entered if they can't do that in their current View.

The solution is to define a number of levels of validation, in addition to the levels that represent full and no validation. Let's take a look at a simple ValidationLevel enumeration that could fulfill this requirement:

namespace CompanyName.ApplicationName.DataModels.Enums 
{ 
  public...