Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Where Are We?

WPF applications have a great deal of power, at which this chapter can only hint. The base services of the application aren't too surprising, but the support for page-based navigation and browser hosting certainly adds a new capability for Windows applications, further enhanced with .NET 2.0 ClickOnce support.

Building your application is a matter of grouping controls in containers—either single content containers, like windows or buttons, or multiple content containers that provide layout capabilities, like the canvas and the grid.

When bringing your controls together, you'll want to populate them with data that's synchronized with the in-memory home of the data, which is what data binding is for, and keep them pretty, which is what styles are for. If you want to declare data or styles in your XAML, you can do so using resources, which are just arbitrarily named objects that aren't used to render the WPF UI directly.

If no amount of data or style property settings makes you satisfied with the look of your control, you can replace it completely with control templates, which can comprise other controls or graphics primitives. In addition, you can apply graphics operations, like rotating, scaling, or animation, to 2D or 3D graphics primitives or controls in WPF's integrated way. These elements can further be gathered into documents for viewing or printing.