Creating a standard menu

A drop-down menu is one of the most (if the not the most) recognizable aspects of graphical user interfaces. Not as popular today as it was in the early days of GUIs, it's still a vital part of many applications. Let's see how to create one with WPF.

Getting ready

Make sure Visual Studio is up and running.

How to do it…

We'll create a simple Notepad-like text editor with a typical menu:

1. Create a new WPF application named CH04.Menus.

2. Open MainWindow.xaml. Add two rows to the existing Grid as follows:

   <Grid.RowDefinitions>
       <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
       <RowDefinition />
   </Grid.RowDefinitions>    

3. Add a TextBox to the second row:

   <TextBox Grid.Row="1" AcceptsReturn="True" />

4. Add a Menu control to the first row with MenuItem objects underneath:

   <Menu>
       <MenuItem Header="_File">
           <MenuItem Header=" _Exit" />
       </MenuItem>
       <MenuItem Header="_Edit">
           <MenuItem Command="Copy" />
        ...