Windows Presentation Foundation is next big thing.
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What is WPF?
The Windows Presentation
Foundation (or WPF), formerly code-named Avalon, is a
graphical subsystem in .NET Framework 3.0. WPF is an API for building
graphical user interfaces (UI) for desktop applications with the .NET
Framework.
Physically, it's a set of .NET
assemblies and supporting tools. It's intended to provide a unified API for
creating rich, sophisticated user interfaces on Windows XP and Windows Vista.
WPF is just one part of a larger
picture. Three additional libraries were also released as part of .NET 3.0. All
four of these libraries have the same intent of providing a consistent, unified
API for their domain. Additionally, combining any of these four libraries in an
application can yield some very impressive results.
The three sibling libraries of
WPF are WCF, WF and CardSpace. I will discuss about those later post.
The immediate predecessor to WPF
is Windows Forms, the graphical API available to developers in .NET 2.0 and
earlier. Windows Forms provides a managed wrapper for accessing the graphical
functions of the traditional Windows API. WPF differs fundamentally in that it
builds on top of DirectX. The DirectX API was originally focused on multimedia
and game programming in particular. As such, you are able to do some nifty
visual tricks in WPF that were practically impossible with Windows Forms. It
also means that WPF will take advantage of hardware acceleration when it is
available.
See demo WPF application in below link under Sample.
References
Sample