Chapter 1. The road to Avalon (WPF)
Figure 1.1. Although Windows 3.x came out more than 15 years ago, it has an influence on the UIs of today.
Figure 1.2. To have a control change state, you have to force it to redraw itself, as with these buttons shown before and during a click.
Figure 1.3. The set of available native controls in HTML is limited. This image shows most of them.
Figure 1.4. Most applications don’t handle DPI changes elegantly. These are Windows programs running at a higher DPI, with various poor side effects. Vista handles higher DPI settings better than XP but still has issues; for example, old toolbars tend to be tiny.
Figure 1.5. Which one requires an artist? Users have a much greater expectation for pretty UIs these days.
Figure 1.6. Hello, World! in XAMLPad. XAMLPad is a utility that can immediately render XAML as you type.
Chapter 2. Getting started with WPF and Visual Studio 2008
Figure 2.1. Creating a new WPF Windows project via the New Project dialog in Visual Studio
Figure 2.2. A new WPF Windows application
Figure 2.3. Hello, World! Design view. This is a drag-and-drop editor for WPF controls.
Figure 2.4. Pressing the button. Note that this is how the message box looks under Windows Vista. If you’re using XP, it will look like the old-style message box.
Figure 2.5. A TextBlock with font styles. Doing this in Windows Forms is really hard.
Figure 2.6. Where have all the spaces gone?
Figure 2.7. A TextBlock with whitespace preserved