Creating Visually Appealing User Interfaces

While adding form elements to a View is simple, it takes somewhat more to produce an application that looks visually appealing. Luckily, WPF provides us with many features that can help us to achieve this goal, such as gradient brushes, rounded corners, opacity control, layered visuals, and animations.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at a number of ways of using these elements in order to greatly improve the visual aspect of our applications. We'll investigate solutions that are simple to implement, using style properties, and other solutions that will take more work, such as animations and custom controls.