Professional C# and .NET, 2021st Edition

31Styling Windows Apps

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Styling Windows apps
• Creating a base drawing with shapes and geometry
• Scaling, rotating, and skewing with transformations
• Using brushes to fill backgrounds
• Working with styles, templates, and resources
• Creating animations
• Working with the VisualStateManager

CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The source code for this chapter is available on the book page at www.wiley.com. Click the Downloads link. The code can also be found at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp2021 in the directory 4_Apps/Styles.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Shapes
• Geometries
• Transformations
• Brushes
• Styles And Resources
• Templates
• Animation
• Transitions
• VisualStates

All the projects have nullable reference types enabled.

STYLING

With modern applications, developers have become a lot more concerned with having good-looking apps. When Windows Forms was the technology for creating desktop applications, the user interface didn't offer many options for styling the applications. Controls had a standard look that varied slightly based on the operating system version on which the application was running, but it was not easy to define a complete custom look.

This changed with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF is based on DirectX and thus offers vector graphics that allow easy resizing of windows and controls. Controls are completely customizable and can have different looks. Styling ...