Datasheet

Using styles and templates

Maintaining consistency in your application is an essential part of making your user interface

design highly usable. To aid your efforts in balancing the consistency and interactivity that you

need in your interface, you can create and use styles and templates in Blend. You can add anima-

tions to styles or you can add property triggers to trigger the change in appearance of a style due to

a property change for its object type, such as when the mouse is over the control, or when it is

pressed. Blend also offers templates to define the control parts of a control, and how the control

parts respond interactively to property changes and events. Using a template, you can define a con-

trol that appears radically different from its default WPF control, yet consistently maintains that

new look.

You can make styles and templates available as resources within a single window, or within the

entire application, or save them in resource dictionaries and make them available to other applica-

tions as well. Styles, templates, and resource dictionaries provide you with a way to extend the

flexibility of your design, because changing a style or template can result in immediately changing

every instance of that style or template.

Linking to data

Using Blend, you can link your controls to different sources of data. For example, you can link

your controls to data from RSS feeds, and you can also link to data in databases. Blend allows you

to link to two kinds of data formats: Common Language Runtime (CLR) Objects and Extensible

Markup Language (XML).

CLR Objects are data items that are usually stored in an ObservableCollection object in the

code-behind files. You can read in data from a database into a data table in the code-

behind file, and then convert it into an ObservableCollection. Then it can be added as a

CLR Object data source in the Data palette of Blend and linked to controls.

XML, as noted earlier in this chapter, is similar to HTML except that it is extensible.

Because it is extensible, the user can create custom tags for data according to certain rules

so that the data can be more easily understood by other computer software. These tags

can be, for example, the names of fields in your database. You can link to a database and

bind controls, such as a list box or combo box, to any field or fields of the database. In

Figure 1.14, for example, an XML data source supplies information from Wikipedia.

For more information on linking controls to data sources, see Chapter 21.

For a great example of how powerful flow documents can be, especially when linked to

data sources, go to

http://firstlook.nytimes.com/ and check out the New

York Times Reader.

the

WEB

the

WEB

CROSS-REF

Designing Next-Generation User Experiences

Part I

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