Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

Printing with WPF

Lesson 31 explained how to print in a Windows Forms application. Your program catches

a

PrintDocument object’s PrintPage event handler and uses its e.Graphics parameter to

generate graphics for each page of the printout.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) uses a different printing model that many program-

mers find more intuitive. Instead of making your program respond to

PrintPage events to gen-

erate printed pages, a WPF program’s code can directly print visual objects that it draws using

WPF controls such as

Label and TextBox.

In addition to being easier to understand, this approach has a couple of other benefits.

For example, it lets the program use the same kind of code to display and print data. In

Windows Forms, a program uses controls such as

TextBox and Label to display text on the

screen but it uses a

Graphics object’s DrawString method to draw text on a printout. WPF

uses the same kinds of

TextBoxes and Labels for both display and printing.

WPF also allows you to zoom in as much as you like without creating a pixellated result. That

means, for example, you can enlarge a window as much as you like for a printout and you’ll

still see a smooth result.

In this lesson, you learn how to produce printouts in WPF. You learn how to print images of win-

dows and other visual objects displayed on the screen centered and scaled to fill the printed page.

PRINTING VISUALS ...