Summary

This chapter explored the built-in application bar and its associated button and menu item classes. The application bar can contain up to four icon buttons and up to 50 menu items. For reasons of usability, the number of menu items should be restricted to six or fewer.

This chapter was mostly devoted to a custom application bar, which is a wrapper for the built-in application bar, and which overcomes many of the built-in application bar’s inherent limitations. The custom AppBar class improves on its built-in counterpart by providing support for data binding, ICommands, toggle buttons, hyperlink buttons, and controlling the visibility of menu items and buttons at runtime. Moreover, it is more compatible with design patterns like MVVM, which rely on data binding.

AppBarToggleButton and AppBarToggleMenuItem allow you to define two sets of properties that become active depending on the state of a bindable Toggle property. AppBarHyperlinkButton and AppBarHyperlinkMenuItem have a bindable NavigateUri property that allows you to navigate to a local or external URI.