Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Menus

Many windows applications provide access to their functionality through a hierarchy of menus. These are typically presented either as a main menu at the top of the window, or as a pop-up "context" menu. WPF provides two menu controls. Menu is for permanently visible menus (such as a main menu), and ContextMenu is for context menus.

Tip

Menus in pre-WPF Windows applications are typically treated differently from other user interface elements. In Win32, menus get a distinct handle type and special event handling provisions. In Windows Forms, most visible elements derive from a Control base class, but menus do not. This means that menus tend to be somewhat inflexible—some user interface toolkits choose not to use the built-in menu handling in Windows simply to avoid the shortcomings. In WPF, menus are just normal controls, so they do not have any special features or restrictions.

Both kinds of menus are built in the same way—their contents consist of a hierarchy of MenuItem elements. Example 5-22 shows a typical example.

Example 5-22. A main menu

<Menu> <MenuItem Header="_File"> <MenuItem Header="_New" /> <MenuItem Header="_Open..." /> <MenuItem Header="_Save" /> <MenuItem Header="Sa_ve As..." /> <Separator /> <MenuItem Header="Page Se_tup..." /> <MenuItem Header="_Print..." /> <Separator /> <MenuItem Header="E_xit" /> </MenuItem> <MenuItem Header="_Edit"> <MenuItem Header="_Undo" /> <MenuItem Header="_Redo" /> <Separator /> <MenuItem Header="Cu_t" /> <MenuItem Header="_Copy" /> <MenuItem ...