WPF Soup To Nuts Webcasts: Adding Pizzaz with Style!
Well, Today, we officially begin the fun stuff. ;-) Today, in my WPF Soup To Nuts webcast series, we're talking about Styles, Templates and Themes. Now, as you know, WPF is very powerful. Last week, we learned how powerful it can be connecting to data. Well, this week, we're going to see how we reuse some of our previously gained knowledge with Resources and Databinding to build reusable visual styles. Styles give us a powerful way to develop our own user experience, going way beyond the traditional battleship grey dialog boxes and buttons from the past. In fact, they're so powerful, that we can easily create buttons (or anything for that matter) that are rotated, nonstandard shaped, or what ever else your imagination can think of... and then reuse that style for all the controls of that type.
We will also look at Control Templates... or blueprints for controls. With a template, I can define my control visually or even functionally and reuse that template globally throughout my form for all controls of the same type. When I want to change one aspect of the control, I do it in one central location and all the controls change on the canvas.
Lastly, we'll talk about Themes. Themes are Windows way of building a consistent User Experience. WPF has the ability to examine the theme settings for the OS and with that ability, we can customize our own user experience to match the settings of the host OS.
Building differientated user experiences is what WPF is all about and this week we will start to look at the basics of them.
You can sign up right here. And as always, my demo code is attached.
Bill