Professional C# 2012 and .NET 4.5

Chapter 35

Core WPF

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Shapes and geometry as the base drawing elements
• Scaling, rotating, and skewing with transformations
• Brushes to fill backgrounds
• WPF controls and their features
• Defining a layout with WPF panels
• Styles, templates, and resources
• Triggers and the Visual State Manager
• Animations
• 3-D

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at http://www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118314425 on the Download Code tab. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Shapes Demo
• Geometry Demo
• Transformation Demo
• Brushes Demo
• Decorations Demo
• Layout Demo
• Styles and Resources
• Trigger Demo
• Template Demo
• Animation Demo
• Visual State Demo
• 3D Demo

UNDERSTANDING WPF

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a library to create the UI for smart client applications. This chapter gives you broad information on the important concepts of WPF. It covers a large number of different controls and their categories, including how to arrange the controls with panels, customize the appearance using styles, resources, and templates, add some dynamic behavior with triggers and animations, and create 3-D with WPF.

One of the main advantages of WPF is that work can be easily separated between designers and developers. The outcome from the designer’s work can directly be used by the developer. To make this possible, you need to understand eXtensible Application Markup Language, or XAML. Readers unfamiliar ...