Building User Interfaces in .NET with Windows Presentation Foundation

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Building User Interfaces in .NET with Windows
Presentation Foundation

• Ivan Towlson
• Mindscape

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Agenda

• User interface technologies in .NET
• WPF tiki tour
• Practicalities

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User Interface Options in .NET

• Windows Forms
• ASP.NET
• GDI
• Rich documents (HTML, Adobe Reader)
• Media
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Silverlight

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What is WPF?

• Umbrella framework for getting input from, or
  getting output to, users
• Unifies forms, graphics (2D and 3D), documents
  and media
• Take advantage of graphics cards even in normal
  applications
• First-class support for markup

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Tiki Tour of WPF

• XAML
• Layout
• Controls
• Commands and events
• Styles and templates
• Data binding
• Animation
• Navigation

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Layout

• The death of absolute positioning
• Panels and documents
• What are X, Dock and Row properties of?

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Controls and Visuals

• Content models
• Graphics
• Transforms and animation

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Styles and Templates

• Control Behaviour Rendering
• Rendering Visual Tree Style
• Custom controls vs. control templates

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Data Binding

• Binding to a data object
• Binding to a collection
• Binding to other controls
• The awesome power of a fully operational data
  template

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Events and Commands

• Routed events and the tunnel/bubble model
• Built-in commands
• Custom commands

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Application Models

• Window applications
• Navigation applications
• Navigation, XBAP and the browser
• Structured navigation

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With great power...
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Practicalities

• Interoperability and migration
• Design issues best practices, how do we
  structure WPF programs, etc.
• Tools
• Is WPF right for my project?

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Migration

• Adding WPF UI to a WinForms/Win32 application
• Reusing WinForms/Win32 UI in a WPF application

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Tools

• Visual Studio 2005 via add-in
• Visual Studio 2008
• Expression Blend
• ZAM 3D and other third-party tools

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Should I Use WPF?

• Development considerations documentation, tools,
  third-party / community support
• Project management considerations availability
  of developers, skill levels required
• Deployment considerations OS, rollout, perf
• WPF has a huge payoff in terms of productivity
  and especially in making it simple to step up
  from GUI green screens to visualisation

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Thanks!

• Sells Griffiths, Programming WPF 2e
• Petzold, Applications Code Markup
• Nathan, WPF Unleashed
• Anderson, Essential WPF

ivan_at_hestia.cc http//hestia.typepad.com/flatlande
r
ivan_at_mindscape.co.nz http//www.mindscape.co.nz