Apress - Pro WPF In CSharp2008 Windows Presentation Foundation With .NET.3.5

When .NET first appeared, it introduced a small avalanche of new technologies. There was a whole new way to write web applications (ASP.NET), a whole new way to connect to databases (ADO.NET), new typesafe languages (C# and VB .NET), and a managed runtime (the CLR). Not least among these new technologies was Windows Forms, a library of classes for building Windows applications.

Although Windows Forms is a mature and full-featured toolkit, it’s hardwired to essential bits of Windows plumbing that haven’t changed much in the past ten years. Most significantly, Windows Forms relies on the Windows API to create the visual appearance of standard user interface elements such as buttons, text boxes, check boxes, and so on. As a result, these ingredients are essentially uncustomizable.

For example, if you want to create a stylish glow button you need to create a custom control and paint every aspect of the button (in all its different states) using a lower-level drawing model. Even worse, ordinary windows are carved up into distinct regions, with each control getting its own piece of real estate. As a result, there’s no good way for the painting in one control (for example, the glow effect behind a button) to spread into the area owned by another control. And don’t even think about introducing animated effects such as spinning text, shimmering buttons, shrinking windows, or live previews because you’ll have to paint every detail by hand.

The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) changes all this by introducing a new model with entirely different plumbing. Although WPF includes the standard controls you’re familiar with, it draws every text, border, and background fill itself. As a result, WPF can provide much more powerful features that let you alter the way any piece of screen content is rendered. Using these features, you can restyle common controls such as buttons, often without writing any code. Similarly, you can use transformation objects to rotate, stretch, scale, and skew anything in your user interface, and you can even use WPF’s baked-in animation system to do it right before the user’s eyes. And because the WPF engine renders the content for a window as part of a single operation, it can handle unlimited layers of overlapping controls, even if these controls are irregularly shaped and partially transparent.

Underlying the new features in WPF is a powerful new infrastructure based on DirectX, the hardware-accelerated graphics API that’s commonly used in cutting-edge computer games. This means that you can use rich graphical effects without incurring the performance overhead that you’d suffer with Windows Forms. In fact, you even get advanced features such as support for video files and 3-D content. Using these features (and a good design tool), it’s possible to create eye-popping user interfaces and visual effects that would have been all but impossible with Windows Forms.

Although the cutting-edge video, animation, and 3-D features often get the most attention in WPF, it’s important to note that you can use WPF to build an ordinary Windows application with standard controls and a straightforward visual appearance. In fact, it’s just as easy to use common controls in WPF as it is in Windows Forms. Even better, WPF enhances features that appeal directly to business developers, including a vastly improved data binding model, a new set of classes for printing content and managing print queues, and a document feature for displaying large amounts of formatted text. You’ll even get a new model for building page-based applications that run seamlessly in Internet Explorer and can be launched from a website, all without the usual security warnings and irritating installation prompts. Overall, WPF combines the best of the old world of Windows development with new innovations for building modern, graphically rich user interfaces. Although Windows Forms applications will continue to live on for years, developers embarking on new Windows development projects should consider WPF.