Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation: Build responsive UIs for desktop applications with WPF, 2nd Edition

Gain the expertise you need to build custom application frameworks and responsive and visually appealing user interfaces with WPF, C#, and .NET

Key Features

• Discover a smarter way of working with WPF using the MVVM software architectural pattern
• Create your own lightweight application framework to build your future applications upon
• Understand data binding and learn how to use it in an application

Book Description

Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides several libraries and APIs for developers to create engaging user experiences. This book features a wide range of simple through to complex examples to demonstrate how to develop enterprise-grade applications for Windows desktop with WPF.

This updated second edition of Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation starts by covering the benefits of using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) software architectural pattern with WPF, before guiding you through debugging your WPF apps. The book will then take you through the application architecture and building the foundation layer for your apps. As you advance, you'll get to grips with data binding, explore the various built-in WPF controls, and customize them to suit your requirements. You'll learn how to create custom controls to meet your needs when the built-in functionality is not enough. You'll also learn how to enhance your applications using practical animations, stunning visuals, and responsive data validation. To ensure that your app is not only interactive but also efficient, you'll focus on improving application performance, and finally, discover the different methods for deploying your applications.

By the end of this book, you'll be proficient in using WPF for developing efficient yet robust user interfaces.

What you will learn

• Discover MVVM and how it assists development with WPF
• Implement your own custom application framework
• Become proficient with Data Binding
• Understand how to adapt the built-in controls
• Get up to speed with animations
• Implement responsive data validation
• Create visually appealing user interfaces
• Improve application performance
• Learn how to deploy your applications

Who this book is for

This Windows book is for developers with basic to intermediate-level knowledge of Windows Presentation Foundation and for those interested in simply enhancing their WPF skills. If you're looking to learn more about application architecture and designing user interfaces in a visually appealing manner, you'll find this book useful.

Table of Contents

1. A Smarter Way of Working with WPF
2. Debugging WPF Applications
3. Writing Custom Application Frameworks
4. Becoming Proficient with Data Binding
5. Using the Right Controls for the Job
6. Adapting the Built-In Controls
7. Mastering Practical Animations
8. Creating Visually Appealing User Interfaces
9. Implementing Responsive Data Validation
10. Completing that Great User Experience
11. Improving Application Performance
12. Deploying Your Masterpiece Application
13. What Next?

Sheridan Yuen is a Microsoft .NET MCTS and Oracle Java SCJP certified software developer, living in London, England. His passion for coding made him stand out from the crowd right from the start. Since his second year at university, he was employed as a teaching assistant for the first year student coding workshops and has been returning as a guest lecturer.

Among other prestigious positions, he was the primary software developer for the Ministry of Sound group for four years, working on their main music business application, responsible for creating their multi-award-winning albums. This application managed to increase its users' productivity by up to 80% in some cases.

In addition to this, he architected a unique ticket scanning application for their award-winning nightclub, making it the first club in the world to introduce scanned ticket entry across all streams for their clients. Coming from a musical background and being a qualified audio engineer, with experience of record production and digital audio, this post was a perfect union.

He soon became a popular figure in the C# and WPF sections of the Stack Overflow,"question and answer" website, being awarded enough reputation by the community members to raise him too well within the top half percent of all users. While authoring this book and other projects has kept him away for some time, he is keen to return to continue to help new users to get to grips with WPF.