Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

Appendix H

WPF Controls

This appendix lists the most useful Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) controls and briefly describes their purposes. This list does not include all of the hundreds of classes that WPF defines; it lists only the tools most likely to appear in the window designer’s Toolbox.

These controls are part of the System.Windows.Controls namespace. In contrast, the controls used in Windows Forms are contained in the System.Windows.Forms namespace. Many of the controls in the two namespaces serve very similar purposes, although they have different capabilities. For example, both namespaces have buttons, labels, combo boxes, and check boxes but only the System.Windows.Controls classes provide foreground and background brushes, render transformations, complex content, and XAML-defined triggers.

For much more information about WPF controls and WPF in general, see my book WPF Programmer’s Reference (Stephens, Wrox 2010). You can learn more about the book at http://www.vb-helper.com/wpf.htm.

Note that not all of the controls described here are available by default when you create a new WPF application. You need to add some of these controls to the Toolbox before you can use them. To add a control that is missing, right-click a Toolbox section and select Choose Items. On the Choose Toolbox Items dialog box, select the WPF Components tab to display the dialog box shown in Figure H-1. Check the boxes next to the controls that you want, and click OK.

FIGURE H-1: Use this ...