Where Are We?

The Application object forms the initial piece on which to build your WPF applications. The Application definition, along with any Window or Page objects you may have, are most often split between a declarative XAML file for the look and an imperative code file for the behavior. Your applications can be normal, like a standard Windows application, or navigation-based, like the browser. In fact, the latter can be integrated into the browser, and both can be deployed and kept up to date over the Web using ClickOnce.

Building your application is a matter of grouping controls in containers: either single content containers, such as windows or buttons, or multiple content containers that provide layout capabilities, such as the canvas and the grid.

When bringing your controls together, you'll want to populate them with data that's synchronized with the in-memory home of the data, which is what data binding is for, and keep them pretty, which is what styles are for. If you want to declare data or styles in your XAML, you can do so using resources, which are just arbitrary named objects that aren't used to render WPF UI directly.

If no amount of data or style property settings makes you satisfied with the look of your control, you can replace it completely with control templates, which can be made up of other controls or graphics primitives. In addition, you can apply graphic operationssuch as rotating, scaling, or animationto graphic primitives or controls in WPF's integrated way.