Investigating the built-in controls

There are a wide range of controls included in the .NET Framework. They cover most common scenarios and it is rare that we will need to create our own controls in a typical form-based application. All of the UI controls tend to have their functionality built up from a large number of common base classes.

All controls will share the same core-level base classes that provide the core-level functionalities and then a number of derived framework-level classes that provide the functionality that is associated with the WPF Framework, such as data binding, styling and templating. Let's take a look at an example.

Inheriting framework abilities

As with the base classes in our application framework, the built-in WPF controls also have an inheritance hierarchy, with each successive base class offering some additional functionality. Let's look at the Button class as an example. Here is the inheritance hierarchy of the Button control:

System.Object 
  System.Windows...