Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation

Overview

The Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsofts next generation UI framework to create applications with a rich user experience. It is part of the .NET framework 3.0 and higher.

WPF combines application UIs, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, documents and multimedia into one single framework. Its vector based rendering engine uses hardware acceleration of modern graphic cards. This makes the UI faster, scalable and resolution independent.

The followinig illustration gives you an overview of the main new features of WPF

Separation of Appearance and Behavior

WPF separates the appearance of an user interface from its behavior. The appearance is generally specified in the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), the behavior is implemented in a managed programming language like C# or Visual Basic. The two parts are tied together by databinding, events and commands. The separation of appearance and behavior brings the following benefits:

• Appearance and behaviour are loosely coupled
• Designers and developers can work on separate models.
• Graphical design tools can work on simple XML documents instead of parsing code.

Rich composition

Controls in WPF are extremely composable. You can define almost any type of controls as content of another. Although these flexibility sounds horrible to designers, its a very powerful feature if you use it appropriate. Put an image into a button to create an image button, or put a list of videos into a combobox to choose a video file.

 
<Button>
    <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
        <Image Source="speaker.png" Stretch="Uniform"/>
        <TextBlock Text="Play Sound" />
    </StackPanel>
</Button>
 
 

Highly customizable

Because of the strict separation of appearance and behavior you can easily change the look of a control. The concept of styles let you skin controls almost like CSS in HTML. Templates let you replace the entire appearance of a control.

The following example shows an default WPF button and a customized button.

Resolution independence

All measures in WPF are logical units - not pixels. A logical unit is a 1/96 of an inch. If you increase the resolution of your screen, the user interface stays the same size - it just gets crispier. Since WPF builds on a vector based rendering engine it's incredibly easy to build scaleable user interfaces.

 Comments on this article

Pham Kien Quoc	Commented on 17.September 2011 Very useful for beginner in just 5 min . Thanks a lot.
pragati	Commented on 19.September 2011 very good...
Haritha	Commented on 19.September 2011 It really gud :)
bhanu	Commented on 20.September 2011 Good one
sreejith	Commented on 20.September 2011 Thank you..I think its more helpful for the beginners in WPF
Amit Verma	Commented on 20.September 2011 very helpful and easy to understand
Abu Hanin	Commented on 20.September 2011 Similar to MSDN documentation but looks nicer & richer
kartik	Commented on 21.September 2011 there is an sql error on the tutorials like user desing process...please fix it out asap...thankyou
Sweta Pandey	Commented on 21.September 2011 Thanks Sir, thank you so much for all notes and example of WPF.........
Dhruvangini	Commented on 22.September 2011 It is so beautifully explained that any one can understand. Thanks
BoYu Gao	Commented on 22.September 2011 that is wonderful
Mark	Commented on 22.September 2011 You really need a spellchecker and a proofreader. Crispier??
awesome	Commented on 22.September 2011 one word. AWESOME!
Garima	Commented on 23.September 2011 Very nice article for WPF Beginners...
sakthi	Commented on 23.September 2011 Pushing the beginners to mine more !!! .... Good
Garima	Commented on 23.September 2011 Very nice article for WPF Beginners...
RobertS	Commented on 24.September 2011 Cool.. been looking for a nice WPF intro and this is by far the best and coolest... thanks
anjali	Commented on 25.September 2011 This is very helpful to learn
chaitanya	Commented on 26.September 2011 This article has given nice introduction to the wpf beginners.
Mobashir Ahmad	Commented on 26.September 2011 Good Explaination
Roshan	Commented on 26.September 2011 really...good one
Nithya	Commented on 27.September 2011 Good one
Mukesh	Commented on 27.September 2011 What a intro?????
pradeep	Commented on 27.September 2011 very useful
deepak	Commented on 27.September 2011 thnxx sir nice intro