11. Resources, Styles, and Templates

Not long after WPF was released, I was hired by an antiques dealer to design a system for managing their appraisals. Because screen real estate was at a premium (isn’t it always?) I wanted to use panels that opened and closed from the side of the screen—a simpler version of the Visual Studio toolbox, without docking. That wasn’t part of the WinForms toolkit, and writing custom WinForms controls isn’t for the faint of heart. The existing third-party controls seemed overkill, so a friend suggested I look at WPF. To say I was skeptical is something of an understatement. Like many of you, I had years invested in WinForms, and I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to tackle an entirely new platform for what was, after ...

Get Fluent Windows® 8.1 App Development now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.