Programming Articles

In the previous articles in this series on building a WPF business application (check www.CODEMag.com for the others), you created a new WPF business application using a pre-existing architecture. You added code to display a message while loading resources in the background. You also learned how to load and close user controls on a main window. You built a login screen, a user feedback screen, and a user maintenance screen to display a list of users, and the detail for a single user. In this article, you're going to finish this user maintenance screen by learning to manage button state, and to add, edit, and delete users.

In part 3 of this series, you'll build a user feedback screen to allow a user to submit feedback about the application. You build a view model and bind an Entity Framework entity class to the screen. The entity class contains data annotations and you learn to display validation messages from any data annotations that fail validation. You also start learning how to build a design pattern for standard add, edit, and delete screens. You build a user list control and a user detail control to display all users in a table, and the detail for each one you click on.

In Part 2 of this series, you're going to display a status message by sending a message from a View Model class to the main window. You're going to reuse the splash screen area that you built in Part 1 to display informational messages. A timer will be used to have these informational messages disappear after a specific amount of time. Finally, you'll create a WPF login screen with an image, a title area, and input fields for a user name and password. The user name and password data is validated and appropriate validation messages are displayed to the user.

When building any kind of application, it's important to start with a good architecture, a set of reusable helper classes, and design patterns. In this first of a multi-part series of articles, you'll learn to use a message broker to eliminate strong coupling between classes. You'll see how to display status and informational messages to the user while resources are loading. Instead of having a ton of open windows, you'll learn to load user controls onto a single window and how to aggregate controls and build large screens.