Chapter 31. WPF Control Templates and UserControls

This chapter concludes your investigation of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) programming model by introducing you to the process of building customized controls. While it is true that the content model and style mechanism do allow you to add unique bits to a standard WPF control, the process of building custom templates and UserControls allows you to fully define how a control should render its output, respond to state transitions, and integrate into the WPF APIs.

This chapter begins by examining two topics that are important when creating a custom control, specifically dependency properties and routed events. Once you understand these topics, you will then learn about the role of a default template and how to view them programmatically at runtime.