Wpf Application Structure? C#

Question

I'm trying to port an application of mine from Java to C# and I can't for the life of me wrap my head around Wpf application structure.

In Java my application runs the main() method which registers native hooks and calls launch(args) for my Application class, which sets up the GUI and starts the FXApplication. I have another thread, which is run from the GUI class (for running robot scripts) can be started and stopped with f4 and f5 respectively, hence the native hooks.

In C# I can't figure out how to achieve the same effect. Without a main method I don't understand how you initialize objects outside of the scope of the MainWindow and run other threads without coupling the GUI to everything.

Answer 1

There are two questions in there.

First is about threading. When you create a new thread, it has no knowledge about UI, irrespective where or when it was created or started. So you can easily create all your worker threads in MainWindow. But if you want those threads to update the UI, then they must do so through Dispatcher.

Second is about hooking up key-presses. For that, you would use event handler attached to KeyDown event on window. Something like this. In WPF, you don't generally need to use native hooks. If you want to use this to start and stop the worker thread, then you should handle it in UI and then "send" it to the worker thread. IMO you should not catch it in thread itself.

Another thing to point out is that you can change the application structure to better fit what you describe. WPF allows to have App.xaml as application entry point, which is what standard template is using. But that is only convenience. You can make your own Main method, create App class, set up it's UI and start it up entirely in code. No need to xaml.