Book excerpt: Gain comprehensive insight into WPF mechanics and capabilities. Key Features Gain a strong foundation in WPF features and patterns Leverage the MVVM pattern to build decoupled, maintainable apps Increase efficiency through Performance tuning and UI automation Book Description Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft's development tool for building rich Windows client user experiences that incorporate UIs, media, and documents. With the updates in .NET 4.7, Visual Studio 2017, C# 7, and .NET Standard 2.0, WPF has taken giant strides and is now easier than ever for developers to use. If you want to get an in-depth view of WPF mechanics and capabilities, then this book is for you. The book begins by teaching you about the fundamentals of WPF and then quickly shows you the standard controls and the layout options. It teaches you about data bindings and how to utilize resources and the MVVM pattern to maintain a clean and reusable structure in your code. After this, you will explore the animation capabilities of WPF and see how they integrate with other mechanisms. Towards the end of the book, you will learn about WCF services and explore WPF's support for debugging and asynchronous operations. By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of WPF and will know how to build resilient applications. What you will learn Understand the fundamentals of WPF Explore the major controls and manage element layout Implement data binding Create custom elements that lead to a particular implementation path Customize controls, styles, and templates in XAML Leverage the MVVM pattern to maintain a clean and reusable structure in your code Master practical animations Integrate WCF services in a WPF application Implement WPFs support for debugging and asynchronous operations Who this book is for The book is intended for developers who are relatively new to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), or those who have been working with WPF for some time, but want to get a deeper understanding of its foundation and concepts to gain practical knowledge. Basic knowledge of C# and Visual Studio is assumed.