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Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

You're reading from   Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation Build responsive UIs for desktop applications with WPF

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Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838643416
Length 626 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Sheridan Yuen Sheridan Yuen
Author Profile Icon Sheridan Yuen
Sheridan Yuen
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Table of Contents (15) Chapters Close

Preface 1. A Smarter Way of Working with WPF 2. Debugging WPF Applications FREE CHAPTER 3. Writing Custom Application Frameworks 4. Becoming Proficient with Data Binding 5. Using the Right Controls for the Job 6. Adapting the Built-In Controls 7. Mastering Practical Animations 8. Creating Visually Appealing User Interfaces 9. Implementing Responsive Data Validation 10. Completing that Great User Experience 11. Improving Application Performance 12. Deploying Your Masterpiece Application 13. What Next? 14. Other Books You May Enjoy

Layering visuals

So far, we've just looked at simple redefinitions of the standard controls, by altering shapes, sizes, borders, and other common properties. However, we can do much more than that with WPF. Before continuing with this section, it is important to know that the more visuals each control is comprised of, the longer it will take to render them and so, this can negatively affect performance.

As such, it's important not to overdo the visual aspect of our controls if our application will be run on slow, old computers. Conversely, if we know that our end users will have plenty of RAM and/or graphics cards, then we can go the extra distance and develop visually stunning controls. Let's take a look at some techniques that we can use to improve the look of our controls.

Throwing shadows

One of the easiest ways to make our UI elements pop out of the screen is to add a shadow to them. Each control has an Effect property that is inherited from the UIElement class. We...

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