Chapter 3. WPF from 723 feet[1]
1 From 10,000 feet you can’t really read the screen.
This chapter covers:
- How WPF fits into Windows
- All the various components and layers of WPF
- Microsoft and third-party WPF tools
- What Microsoft has learned from Homeland Security
Think about how, prior to WPF, you might have approached an application with respect to the user interface, multimedia, and document lifecycle. You might have chosen Windows Forms to implement most of the UI, perhaps calling out to Adobe Flash for the multimedia aspects, and using PDF or proprietary file formats to handle the documentation artifacts. You may also have used Microsoft’s Windows Media Player components or Apple’s QuickTime to embed video content for tutorials or how-tos in your application. With WPF, Microsoft addresses all these concerns with a single, unified base technology.
One of the implications of this is that WPF is pretty extensive—extensive enough that a quick glance won’t tell you what’s there and where to find it. The main purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of all the pieces that make up WPF, including many of the new acronyms. We’ll discuss many of these pieces in much greater detail throughout the rest of the book, but we think it’s important to have a mental framework for the whole technology.