Everything you need to know about WPF

WPF is a short form of Windows Presentation Foundation. It is one of the ideal frameworks to build Windows applications. The main concept of introducing the WPF framework is that user can develop a rich user interface comprising of animation, 3D, rich colour with minimum code complexity.

WPF can be considered as progress or growth over WinForms. WPF is able to produce easy to operate graphical display system for windows. With the help of WPF, you can easily do the separation between UI and business logic.

What is WPF?

WPF is a vector-based rendering engine that is mainly using the hardware acceleration of modern graphic cards. The modern graphic cards can make the UI faster and highly scalable. WPF applications can be organized in your system as a standalone desktop program or can be hosted as an implanted object in a website. WPF was first introducing in.NET framework with 3.0 versions. After that, so many other features have been added in the subsequent.NET framework version of WPF.

The WPF tutorial will explain the WPF architecture and features that are required to understand and build WPF applications so that you can bring change in windows applications.

Why WPF?

• There are several reasons for which a developer or programmer can use the WPF platform. Some of the reasons are given below:
• This is an ideal platform to use when you need to deal with various media types.
• WPF allows you to grab the benefit of the large.NET class library because it is built on the.NET technology.
• It also allows you to create a skinned user interface and also helps you when you required loading a portion of the UI or wanting to bind XML data.
• With the help of the WPF framework, you can graphically be designed tools on a very simple XML document instead of parsing code.
• It also supports a flow document model that can enable Desktop-Publishing quality of the layout.
• Instead of WinAPI, WPF is building on DirectX. It offers the client computer’s graphic system. Thus, it has a great graphic rendering power.
• WPF is resolution independent, thus any application developed in WPF can run on mobile devices or 20-inch monitor as well.
• As appearance and behaviour are loosely coupled, it is easier for the developers and designers to work on two separate modes.
• WPF also allows you to use the hardware acceleration of drawing the GUI for better performance.

Architecture of WPF:

Other user interfaces which have been offered by Microsoft like MFC and Windows forms were just wrappers around the User32 and GDI32 DLLs, whereas WPF makes minimal use of User32. So, it is more than a Wrapper. It is also the part of the.NET Framework. WPF mainly contains a mixture of managed and unmanaged code.

The major components of WPF architecture are given below:

• Presentation Framework
• Presentation Core
• CLR
• Milcore
• User32
• DirectX
• Kernel

The Presentation Framework and Presentation Core is written on Managed Code. Whereas Milcore is a part of unmanaged Code that allows tight implementation with DirectX (use for display and rendering). CLR will make the development procedure more productive with the help of several features like memory management, error handling etc.

Features of WPF:

• WPF is a powerful framework that can create Windows applications. It has so many features that are given below:
• Data Binding: Mechanism to display and interact within the data of UI elements and data object of the user interface.
• Control inside a control: WPF allows you to define a control inside another control as content.
• Alternative Input: It supports Multi-touch input for Windows 7 and even more.
• Media Services: WPF provides an integrated system to build user interfaces with common media elements including audio, images and video as well.

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