Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

Chapter 7. Creating Visually Appealing User Interfaces

While it is simple to add form elements to a View, it takes somewhat more to produce an application that looks visually appealing. Luckily, WPF provides us with many features that can help us to achieve this goal, such as gradient brushes, rounded corners, opacity control, layered visuals and animations.

In this chapter, we'll be looking at a number of ways of using these elements to greatly improve the visual aspect of our applications. We'll investigate solutions that are simple to implement, using style properties, and others that will take more work, such as animations and custom controls.

Styling applications consistently

One of the easiest ways to make our applications stand out is to make ...