Beginning C# 7 Programming with Visual Studio 2017

15Advanced Desktop Programming

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using routed commands instead of events
• Working with styling controls and applications using XAML styles
• Creating menus using the Menu control and routed commands
• Creating value converters
• Using timelines to create animations
• Defining and referencing static and dynamic resources
• Creating user controls when the common controls are not enough

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found on this book's webpage on Wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The code can also be found at http://github.com/benperk/BeginningCSharp7. The code is in the Chapter15 folder and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

Until this point you have used Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in much the same way that you use the other major technology for creating windows applications in Visual Studio: Windows Forms. But that is about to change. WPF can style any control and use templates to change existing controls to look nothing like they do out‐of‐the‐box. In addition to that, you are going to start working more and more by typing XAML. Although this might seem like a burden at first, the ability to move and fine‐tune the display by setting properties will quickly become second nature, and you will find that there is quite a bit in XAML that cannot be done in the designer, such as creating animations.

CREATING AND STYLING CONTROLS

One of the best features of WPF ...