Visual Basic® 2010 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 5. WPF Designer

The WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) Designer allows you to build WPF windows interactively much as the Windows Forms Designer lets you build Windows Forms. It provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) surface where you can add controls to a window. If you select one or more controls on the designer's surface, the Properties window displays the objects' properties and lets you edit many of them.

In addition to the WYSIWYG design surface, the designer provides an XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) code editor. Here you can view and edit the XAML code that defines the user interface. This lets you edit properties and arrange controls in ways that are impossible using the WYSIWYG designer.

This chapter provides an introduction to the WPF Designer. It explains how to add controls to a window, move and size controls, set control properties, and add code to respond to control events.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Windows Presentation Foundation is quite large and complex, requiring you to learn about a whole new set of controls, objects, properties, animations, and other items. It even uses a whole new system for properties and events that isn't used by Windows Forms.

The chapters in this book cover WPF in enough detail to get you started and let you build an effective application, but there's much more to WPF. For more details, see my book WPF Programmer's Reference: Windows Presentation Foundation with C# 2010 and .NET 4.0 (Stephens, Wrox, 2009). Some ...