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In WPF applications, there are two very different ingredients that are both described as resources:

In the previous chapter you learned about the WPF resource system, which lets you define objects in one place and reuse them throughout your markup. Although you can use resources to store a wide variety of objects, one of the most common reasons you’ll use them is to hold .

When you were first introduced to WPF in Chapter 1, you learned that it’s powered by an entirely new graphics model—one that handles prebuilt controls and custom-drawn graphics in the same way, uses hardware acceleration with ordinary two-dimensional drawing, and favors scalable vectors over bitmaps.

In the previous chapter, you started your exploration into WPF’s 2-D drawing features. You considered how you can use simple Shape-derived classes in combination with transforms, images, and fancy brushes to create a variety of graphical effects. However, the concepts you learned still fall far short of what you need to create (and manipulate) detailed 2-D scenes made up of vector art. That’s because there’s a wide gap between rectangles, ellipses, and polygons and the sort of clip art you see in graphically rich applications (such as Flash applets).

In the past, Windows developers were forced to choose between convenience and flexibility. For maximum convenience, they could use prebuilt controls. These controls worked well enough, but they offered limited customization and almost always had a fixed visual appearance. Occasionally, some controls provided a less than intuitive “owner drawing” mode that allowed developers to paint a portion of the control by responding to a callback. But the basic controls—buttons, text boxes, check boxes, list boxes, and so on—were completely locked down.

Data binding is the time-honored tradition of pulling information out of an object and displaying it in your application’s user interface, without writing the tedious code that does all the work. Often, rich clients use data binding, which adds the ability to push information from the user interface back into some object—again, with little or no code. Because many Windows applications are all about data (and all of them need to deal with data some of the time), data binding is a top concern in a user interface technology like WPF.

In Chapter 16, you learned the essentials of WPF data binding—how to pull information out of an object and display it in a window, with little or no code. Along the way, you considered how to make that information editable, how to format it, how to convert it to the representation you need, and how to incorporate more advanced features such as validation. However, you still have more to learn.

So far, you’ve learned a wide range of techniques and tricks for using WPF data binding to display information in the form you need. Along the way, you’ve seen many examples that revolve around the lowly ListBox control.

Using the WPF skills you’ve picked up so far, you can craft windows and pages that include a wide variety of elements. Displaying fixed text is easy—you simply need to add the TextBlock and Label elements to the mix.

Printing in WPF is vastly more powerful than it was with Windows Forms. Tasks that weren’t possible using the.NET libraries and that would have forced you to use the Win32 API orWMI (such as checking a print queue) are now fully supported using the classes in the new System. Printing namespace.