Adding a standard menu to the WPF application

One of the most common parts of WPF applications is the menu, as it gives various options within a very little space. WPF comes with a control named Menu, to hold items named MenuItem.

Let's learn more about this menu control and how to add it to Windows applications.

Getting ready

Open your Visual Studio, and create a new WPF project called CH02.MenuDemo.

How to do it...

Follow these steps to add menus to your WPF application:

1. Open the MainWindow.xaml page, and replace the default Grid with a DockPanel. We will discuss more about this panel in the next chapter.
2. Now add the Menu control inside the DockPanel. This will create the base to hold all the menu items.
3. You can then add root-level menu items and sub-menu items in a hierarchical fashion, as shown in the following code snippet:

<DockPanel> 
    <Menu> 
        <MenuItem Header="File"> 
            <MenuItem Header="New" /> 
            <MenuItem Header="Open" /> 
 ...