Professional C# 4 and .NET 4

Chapter 35. Core WPF

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Shapes and geometry as the base drawing elements

• Scaling, rotating, and skewing with transformations

• Brushes to fill backgrounds

• WPF controls and their features

• Defining a layout with WPF panels

• Styles, templates, and resources

• Triggers and the Visual State Manager

• Animations

• 3-D

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a library to create the UI for smart client applications. This chapter gives you broad information on the important concepts of WPF. You can read about a large number of different controls and their categories, how to arrange the controls with panels, customize the appearance using styles, resources, and templates, add some dynamic behavior with triggers and animations, and get an introduction to 3-D with WPF.

OVERVIEW

One of the big features of WPF is that work can be easily separated between designers and developers. The outcome from the designer's work can directly be used by the developer. To make this possible, you need to understand eXtensible Application Markup Language, or XAML. You should read Chapter 27, "Core XAML" to get information on this XAML syntax.

The first topic of this chapter gives you an overview of the class hierarchy and categories of classes that are used with WPF, including additional information to understand the principles of XAML. WPF consists of several assemblies containing thousands of classes. So that you can navigate within this vast number of classes and find what you need, the overview explains the ...