Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

At Beacon, we design, develop, implement and support powerful solutions to connect and integrate your information, customers, partners, employees, systems, and devices.

 

These solutions are built and deployed around the latest release of Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.5 which contains many new features related to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). WPF is a next-generation presentation system for building Windows client applications with visually stunning user experiences. With WPF, you can create a wide range of both standalone and browser-hosted applications. Some examples are:

 

  • Yahoo! Messenger
  • New York Times Reader
  • Contoso Healthcare Sample Application

 

The core of WPF is a resolution-independent and vector-based rendering engine that is built to take advantage of modern graphics hardware. WPF extends the core with a comprehensive set of application-development features that include Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), controls, data binding, layout, 2-D and 3-D graphics, animation, styles, templates, documents, media, text, and typography. WPF is included in the Microsoft .NET Framework, so you can build applications that incorporate other elements of the .NET Framework class library.

 

WPF offers additional programming enhancements for Windows client application development. One obvious enhancement is the ability to develop an application using both markup and code-behind, an experience that ASP.NET developers should be familiar with. You generally use Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) markup to implement the appearance of an application while using managed programming languages (code-behind) to implement its behaviour. This separation of appearance and behaviour has the following benefits:

 

  • Development and maintenance costs are reduced because appearance-specific markup is not tightly coupled with behaviour-specific code.
  • Development is more efficient because designers can implement an application's appearance simultaneously with developers who are implementing the application's behaviour.
  • Multiple design tools can be used to implement and share XAML markup, to target the requirements of the application development contributors; Microsoft Expression Blend provides an experience that suits designers, while Visual Studio 2005 targets developers.
  • Globalisation and localisation for WPF applications is greatly simplified

 

WPF is a comprehensive presentation technology for building a wide variety of client applications with high visual impact. Click on the link below to read Microsoft’s “Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation”.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970268.aspx