Part 3. Application development

Sad to say, most of the day-to-day work we all do is less about zip-lining across the Grand Canyon, and more about hooking up real-world applications. The nature of those applications differs from place to place, but there are a lot of common threads. In part 3, we’ll talk about the WPF capabilities designed to help build these applications, and also show a number of examples. Although we obviously couldn’t have very deep implementations on any of the examples, we’ve tried to make them as real-worldish as we could, and, where possible, at least vaguely useful.

The first chapter in part 3, chapter 9—“Laying out a more complex application”—goes through the up-front work of designing a WPF application. It also introduces our first new application, a Desktop Wiki for note taking.

This application appears in several chapters, including chapter 10—“Commands,” which explains the unified approach to commands (like File >Print) within WPF—and chapter 11—“Data binding with WPF.” Data Binding is such a large topic, that it spills over into chapter 12—“Advanced data templates and binding,” which covers more advanced binding capabilities and controlling the display of data. Both of these chapters introduce several other sample applications.